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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

BY MARGAUET IJLLIES 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS 
CIRCLE 



BY 

DAVID WATSON RANNIE, M.A. 

AUTHOR OF " A STUDENt's HISTORY OF SCOTLAND " 



WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS 



New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

London: METHUEN & CO. 

1907 






%%^ 



/^f/^o 



as 



PREFACE 

This book does not aim at being a biography of Wordsworth, 
though it is strung on a biographical thread ; and, as the title 
indicates, it is in many places as much about Wordsworth's 
contemporaries as about himself. 

As my method is deliberately desultory, I have tried, with 
whatever success, to be on my guard against repetition, the 
attendant shadow of desultoriness. The first chapter, being 
introductory, contains a kind of forecast, or summary in advance, 
of the chief contents of the chapters that follow. 

It is impossible to be even initiated into Wordsworth without 
knowing, and knowing well, a great deal of his poetry. I have, 
therefore, not stinted myself in quotation and comment, though 
I have tried to avoid the reproduction of verses which might 
conceivably be regarded as trite or insignificant. In the 
Appendix will be found references for those quotations the 
whereabouts of which is not clearly shown in the text. 

The prefixed list of authorities may serve the double purpose 
of showing the sources from which I have drawn, and guiding 
the reader who may wish to go more deeply into the subject. 

D. W. R. 

Winchester, 1907 



PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES 

Wordsworth : Complete Works. Edited by William Knight, with Memoirs. 
The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson 

(Oxford Edition.) 1895. 
The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. With an Introduction by 

John Morley. 9th ed. 1903. In this edition the Poems are arranged 

chronologically. 
Wordsworth's Prose Works. Edited by Grosart. 3 vols. 1876. 
Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 

1896. 
Wordsworth's Literary Criticism. Edited, with an Introduction, by Nowell 

C. Smith. 1905. 
Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes. 5th ed., 1835. With an Introduction, etc., 

by Ernest de Selincourt. 1906. 
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 2nd 

ed. 1904. 
Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour in Scotland. Edited by 

J. C. Shairp. 1874. 

Memoirs of W. Wordsworth. By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 2 vols. 
1851. 

Wordsworth. By F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters.) 

Wordsworth. By Elizabeth Wordsworth. 

Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited, with a Biographical 
Introduction, by James Dykes Campbell. 

Life of Coleridge. By J . D . Campbell . 

Coleridge : Biographia Literaria. (Bohn's Libraries.) 

Coleridge : Table Talk. 

Cotelis : Early Recollections. {Reminiscences.) 1837 and 1847. 
'■' Mrs. Sandford : Thomas Poole afid his Friejids. 2 vols. 
^ Memorials of Coleorton. Edited by Wilham Knight. 2 vols. 1887. 

Southey's Works. 

Southey : Life, Letters, and Select Correspondence. By his Son. 

V Southey. By Edward Dowden. (English Men of Letters.) 

V Charles Lamb : Complete Works, with Memoir. Edited by Alfred Ainger. 
^' Charles Lamb. By Ainger. (English Men of Letters.) 

v Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. 
\ De Ouincey : Collected Works. Edited by David Masson. 

V De Ouincey. By David Masson. (Enghsh Men of Letters.) 
, Japp's (H. A. Page) Life of De Quincey. 

Hazlitt: Complete Works. (Waller and Glover.) 12 vols. Specially 

V Table Talk; Spirit of the Age; Winter slow. 



viii WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Lockhart's Life of Scott. 

Sir Walter Scott's Letters. 2 vols. 1894. 

Sir Walter Scott's Journal. 1825-1832. 1890. 

Works of Professor Wilson. Edited by Ferrier. 

Memoir of Professor Wilson. By his Daughter, Mrs. Gordon. 

Crabb Robinson's Diary, etc. Sadler. 3 vols. 

Francis Jeffrey's Contributions to Edinburgh Review. 4 vols. 

Blackwood'' s Magazine, passim. 

The Quarterly Review, passim. 

The Edinbtirgh Review, passim. 

John Stuart Mill : Autobiography. 

Matthew Arnold : Preface to Selections from Wordsworth. 

Life of F. D. Maurice. By his Son. 

F. W. Robertson : Lecture on Wordsworth, to Working Men. 1853. 

George Brimley. Essays. 

J. C. Shairp : Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. 

Swinburne : Miscellanies. 1886. 

Sir Leslie Stephen : Hours in a Library. 3rd Series. 

R. W. Church : Introduction to Wordsworth Selections in Ward's English 

Poets, and Dante a7id other Essays. 
Professor Walter Raleigh : Words7vorth. 2nd impression. 1903. 
Carlyle : Reminiscences. 
Emerson : English Traits. 
Clayden's Life of Samuel Rogers. 2 vols. 1889. 
Harriet Martineau : Autobiography. 1877. 
Haydon's Correspondence and Table Talk. 
Life of Haydon. By Tom Taylor. 

Sir Henry Taylor. Autobiography, and Notes from Books. 
Life of Sir W. Rowan Hamilton. By Graves. 
Life of Aubrey de Vere. By Wilfrid Ward. 
Mrs. Fletcher's Autobiography. 1874. 
Yarnall's Wordsworth and the Coleridges. 

Wordsworthiafia. Selections from Transactions of Wordsworth Society. 
W. S. Landor. Life, by Forster. 
Journals of Caroline Fox. 
Stanley's Life of Arnold of Rugby. 
Canon Rawnsley : Lake Cotmtry Sketches and Literary Associations of the 

English Lakes. 
Edward Quillinan : Poems. 
Hartley Coleridge : Poems and Memoir. 1851. 
Leigh Hunt : Autobiography. 
Byron's Works. 

Keats' W^orks (including Letters). 
Shelley's Works. Forman. 
Pattison : The Brothers Wiffen. 18S0. 
Life of Alaric Watts. 1 884. 
Legouis : La Jeunesse de Wordsworth. 
Oeftering: WordsworiUs und Byron^s Natur-Dichtung. Karlsruhe. 1901. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface v 

Principal Authorities vii 

I. Introductory i 

II. Childhood and Boyhood among the Lakes . . . i8 

III. The West Country 39 

IV. -'Three People: One Soul" 59 

V. Robert Southey 92 

VI. Grasmere 118 

VII. A Shipwreck 156 

VIII. The Poet as Critic and Politician . . . .170 

IX. Thomas de Quincey 195 

X. "The Frolic and the Gentle" 217 

XI. Wordsworth, Scott, and Christopher North . . 236 

XII. Fellow- workers in Romanticism 258 

XIII. Afterglow .... 279 

XIV. Fame 315 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



William Wordsworth Frontispiece ' 

By Margaret Gillies. 

From a pliotograph by Messrs. Walmslcy Bros., Ambleside. Facing Page 

Wordsworth's Birthplace 24 

From a photograph by Mr. Peititi, Kes2vick. 

Ann Tyson's Home at Hawkshead 26 

Coleridge's House at Nether Stowey 57 

From a pliotograph by Messrs. Frith, Rcigate. 

Alfoxden House as it is now 65 ^ 

From a photograph by Messrs. Frith, Reigate. 

Dorothy Wordsworth gi . 

By W. Crowbent. 

From a pliotograph by Messrs. Walmslcy Bros., Ambleside. 

Robert Southey in 1798 100 

By Robert Hancock, in the National Portrait Gallery. 
Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere 124 

From a photograph by Mr. Petiitt, Keswick. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1814 142 ' 

By Washington Allston, A.R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. 

Grasmere Church 154 

Fro7n a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Kes^uick. 

Mrs. Wordsworth \^^ , 

By Margaret Gillies. 

From a photograph by Messrs. Walmsley Bros., Ambleside. 

Thomas de Quincey 207 / 

By Sir J. Watson Gordon, R.A., P.R.S.A,, in the National Portrait 
Gallery. 



xii WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Facing Page 

Charles Lamb in 1824 or 1825 230 

By Thomas Wageman. 

Sir Walter Scott 246 

By Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. 

Professor John Wilson (" Christopher North ") . . . 252 

Frmn a photograph by Messrs. Walmsley Bros-, Ambleside. 

Rydal Mount 279 

From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 

William Wordsworth 289 

By Henry William Pickersgill, R.A., in the National Portrait 
Gallery, 

Dora Wordsworth (Mrs. Quillinan) 294 

By Margaret Gillies. 

From a photograph by Messrs. IValmsky Bros., Ambleside. 

Fox How 307 

From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 

The Graves 31^ 

From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt^ Keswick. 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS 
CIRCLE 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

WORDSWORTH IN HIS CIRCLE 

IN one sense it seems a dubious use of metaphor to regard 
Wordsworth as the centre of any circle. For, if we think 
of a body of men as a circle, we must think of the centre as one 
of a group who shares its qualities ; one who gives and takes, 
who lives in intellectual community and not alone. Yet no fact 
about Wordsworth is more certain and more striking than his 
essential solitariness. To him, even more than to Milton, his 
own words belong : his soul was like a star and dwelt apart. 
The Puritanism of his age, the culture of his age, are much 
more perceptible in Milton, than are any sympathies of the 
eighteenth or nineteenth century in the work of Wordsworth. 
Milton, for all his mighty originality, was a classicist ; he was 
proud to work on traditional lines ; his form was as great as his 
matter, and is inseparable from it. But Wordsworth had the 
daring, defiant individuality of the true Romantic. He thought 
of himself, and he thought rightly, as a reformer, an innovator, 
in poetry ; and he neither had, nor believed himself to have, 
much essential kinship with any of his contemporaries. He 
always had enthusiastic admirers, and always friends whose 
cordial admiration fell short of enthusiasm ; but there was 
not one of them, who was wholly without perplexity and 



2 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

disappointment about the master, not one who could wholly 
abandon the attitude of apology. 

While disciples and admirers were not without uncertainty 
and occasional dissent, Wordsworth himself habitually felt a 
serene self-complacency which enclosed him as a constant 
envelope, but which must not be confounded with any kind of 
vulgar egotism. Traces of such egotism there undoubtedly 
were in Wordsworth ; but they have really nothing to do with 
that consciousness of mission and certainty of ultimate success 
which gave to this poet the prophet's high self-regard and 
solitary outlook. 

Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807 that he was 
" easy-hearted " with respect to his poems. " Trouble not 
yourself," he wrote, " upon their present reception ; of what 
moment is that compared with what I trust in their destiny ? 
— to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight by 
making the happy happier ; to teach the young and the 
gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to 
become more actively and securely virtuous ; this is their office." 
Such self-criticism is nearly as impersonal as the words which 
immediately precede it — 

" It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be, any 
genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of 
those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the 
world — among those who either are, or are striving to make 
themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, 
and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, 
in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature 
and reverence for God." 

One who thus thinks of poetry and of his own effort in its 
service, must feel and speak as if alone in a wilderness ; and 
perhaps no British man of letters was ever in this sense so un- 
related, so original, as Wordsworth. His detachment is only 
made more obvious by the recognition of his debt to fore- 
runners, and of his disciples' debt to him. In two very 
important respects, the way was prepared for Wordsworth, not 
in Britain only, but in Europe : men's affections were turning 
from purely human interests to interests in which landscape had 
a large share ; and from the attractions of elaborate civilization 
to those of extreme simplicity. No two men ever moved further 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

apart than Rousseau and Wordsworth ; yet their common 
ground and the identity of some of their presuppositions are 
notorious. Nor, among his British contemporaries, is it only 
Wordsworth who reminds us of Rousseau. Goldsmith and 
Cowper, not less than the ballad-restorers or such a Romantic 
mediaevalist as Chatterton, felt, each in his own way, that dis- 
approval of things as they were, that discontent with civilized 
man, which Rousseau indulged with such startling results. 
Goldsmith expressed them with a somewhat conventional 
pensiveness ; in Cowper they were made to subserve the 
Evangelicalism of the age ; but the burden, in both, was a 
praise of rusticity and simplicity, an appreciation of man as 
man, without any lendings or trappings, which are not far from 
Rousseau's central thought. And if Rousseau's thought became 
revolutionary, it must be remembered that Wordsworth's 
sympathies, in some of his strongest hours, were on the side of 
the Revolution. He hailed the great French upheaval as a 
resuscitation of man ; and the passion of his maturity, his hatred 
of Napoleon, was passion for the freedom which the tyrant had 
overthrown. So he read the events. 

But none of this makes Wordsworth's originality less com- 
plete. The Nature to which he preached and led a return, had 
a very different complexion from the Nature of Rousseau's 
worship ; and in the rare atmosphere of its high places we may 
be sure that Goldsmith and Cowper would have found it hard 
to breathe. Even in his earliest work, in the Evetiing Walk 
and Descriptive Sketches (in the latter of which, indeed, Cole- 
ridge saw "the emergence of an original poetic genius above 
the horizon," but which are only remotely Wordsworthian), we 
find a treatment of landscape very different from Cowper's. 
Cowper's feeling for landscape leaves little to be desired in 
genuineness ; but his method of description has nothing of the 
intimacy of Wordsworth's. And when, in and after Lyrical 
Ballads, Wordsworth became Wordsworthian, he thought and 
spoke of Nature, whether as revealed in man, or in that world 
of the open air in which man lives and moves, as no one, 
either in or out of Britain, had thought and spoken of it before. 
Some of his predecessors had observed Nature with affectionate 
care and truly and beautifully rendered her details ; many 
had personified her ; but it was left for Wordsworth to realize 



4 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

her as a living unity, and to love her as the saints love 
God. 

Nor is Wordsworth's isolation less striking if we think of 
the history of his influence. Immediately and remotely, by 
repulsion as well as by attraction, his influence has been 
immense ; but it has never been of the kind which leads to 
imitation. Wordsworth founded no school. His words ran 
over the length and breadth of the land ; his thought has sunk 
deep into one generation after another ; but hardly any one has 
borrowed his accents or attempted to complete his message. 
Nor can it be said of him, as it can be said of, e.g. Byron, Scott, 
or Tennyson, that he was the spokesman of an age, that he 
ministered to prevalent taste, that he made articulate the 
thoughts and feelings which were striving for expression in 
younger as well as lesser men. What in this sense we call 
popularity could never be affirmed of Wordsworth. He sang of 
" things common " indeed ; but there are many ways of " touch- 
ing" such things, and Wordsworth's way was not the world's. 

To find Wordsworth's circle, then, we must think partly of 
his many contemporary literary and artistic friends and ad- 
mirers, cordial always, but always critical ; partly of that opulent 
cluster of Romantic poets with their attendant and like-minded 
critics, among whom Wordsworth, in spite of his singularity, 
must be ranked. In the latter sense, the circle must be held 
to include Burns and Blake, Shelley and Keats, as much as 
Coleridge and Southey, De Quincey and Charles Lamb. 

About the great literary outburst which marked the close of 
the eighteenth, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
so much has been said that, probably, the less one now says the 
better. All that one may hope, or need attempt, to do, is to 
rehearse some generally recognized conclusions and point out 
some special aspects and distinctions. If we ignore these we 
shall miss Wordsworth's place in literary history. 

The Romantic Revival, as it is the fashion to call the out- 
burst, was a unity in diversity. It was a unity, as the spring- 
time is a unity, inasmuch as it brought new life into the world, 
the world of verse and prose, of feeling and thought. It was a 
unity inasmuch as it depended upon novelty ; as it worked on 
men's minds by way of surprise, excitement, sense of change. 
It was a unity inasmuch as it came to be associated, often 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

loosely and rhetorically, with the French Revolution, as if it 
were a kind of literary and artistic counterpart of that great 
social and political movement. But its diversity is more 
apparent than its unity. Even if we could bring ourselves to 
believe that one impulse, or a small number of kindred impulses, 
produced the Romantic Revival, we should have to acknowledge 
that the Revival included a great many very different things, of 
which the interconnection is by no means obvious. It has been 
called — not without good reason — the " Renascence of Wonder." 
It has been called, with equally good reason, the restoration of 
English poetry to Nature, or of Nature to English poetry. It 
was certainly the revival of various and beautiful lyrical 
measures ; it was a new birth of lyrical passion ; it was the 
revival of delight in love ; it was the recovery of power to 
recognize and render the beautiful. It was a reaction against 
a long monopoly in poetry of the satire of society. It included, 
as we have seen, a recovered sense of the beauty and significance 
of landscape ; and with this must be conjoined a recovered 
sense of the attractiveness of animals, and of their claim on 
human interest and affection. It was an assertion of the rights 
of individuality in genius against the obligation of literary 
tradition. It was the discovery of light in the " Dark Ages," 
in that mediaeval world which had seemed the mere ruin and 
negation of classical culture. Last, but not least, in the 
Romantic Revival poetry became essentially and truly " meta- 
physical." It asserted its kinship with theology and philosophy ; 
it assumed prophetic garments and mystical accents ; it became 
the interpreter of symbols, the revealer of realities beyond the 
phantasmagoria of the senses. 

One feature was, on the whole, common to the many aspects 
of the movement, and the recognition of it will bring us back to 
Wordsworth. Romance is the cult of the extraordinary, the 
unusual ; its presupposition is that in the world of art a refuge 
is to be found from the tyranny of what is common, under 
which daily experience groans. Very different were the pre- 
suppositions of the poetry and fiction dominant in Britain for 
more than a hundred years before the Romantic Revival can 
be said to have begun. The poetry of Dryden and Pope 
assumed the all-sufficiency as poetic themes of contemporary 
society, manners, and politics. The so-called " comedy of 



6 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

manners," which culminated in Congreve, found its subject- 
matter and inspiration in the same quarters. The English novel 
renounced all connection with the preposterous romance of the 
seventeenth century, and nourished its mighty youth on the 
most homely, sometimes the most sordid, realities of British life. 
The poetry which intervened between Pope on the one hand, 
and Coleridge and Wordsworth on the other, was a poetry of 
transition, which foreshadowed the future as well as recalled the 
past. But in the prose romance of awe and supernatural terror 
which Horace Walpole handed on to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the 
old-world opulence of Chatterton and Ossian and the ballad- 
restorers, literature turned its face resolutely from the temporary 
and the ordinary towards the extraordinary and the remote. 
And this conversion was of the very essence of the Romanticism 
which glowed like a bright star on the opening of the nineteenth 
century. 

" But what," the reader may ask, " has it got to do with 
Wordsworth ? " Was not Wordsworth's battle for the homely, 
the ordinary ; was it not his boast, his reproach, and his glory, 
that he found " a tale in everything " ; that " the moving acci- 
dent " was not his trade ; and that in humble, everyday life, its 
peasantry, its flowers, its speech, its " nameless unregarded acts," 
the best stuff of poetry was to be found ? The Romanticism of 
Coleridge, of Byron, of Scott, of Southey, of Keats, is evident ; 
but, if the cult of the extraordinary and remote is essential to 
Romanticism, is it consistent, is it reasonable, to call Words- 
worth a Romantic ? 

The answer is that Romanticism claims Wordsworth by 
virtue of his imagination. In the following pages we shall have 
to hear much about imagination. It is enough to say now that 
Wordsworth regarded that faculty very seriously ; that he con- 
ceived himself to possess it in large measure ; and that he 
thought of it as the poet's chief warrant. And while he gloried 
in choosing lowly themes for poetry, he utterly repudiated the 
judgment that his poetry itself was lowly. He believed that 
his imaginative faculty transformed the themes, and transformed 
them creatively, as we may believe that Divine Power transforms 
the raw material or primordial protoplasm of the physical 
universe. The result, according to Wordsworth, was that the 
common lost its commonness, and gained what Romanticism of 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

the more ordinary type sought in the preternatural, the remote, 
the unusual. 

When Wordsworth and Coleridge made the famous compact 
out of which Lyrical Ballads sprang in 1798, they agreed upon 
a division of labour in a joint enterprise. How they did it 
cannot be better told than in Coleridge's words : " It was agreed 
that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters 
supernatural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer from 
our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth 
sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that 
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes 
poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose 
to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of 
every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, 
by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, 
and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world 
before us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in con- 
sequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have 
eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel 
nor understand." 

" To excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural ; " that 
was the end which Wordsworth proposed to himself in his 
poetic operations. It was to be reached by the exercise of 
imagination, and, by virtue of imagination, he was a fellow- 
worker with the author of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 

Perhaps we best understand Wordsworth's literary relation- 
ships and his place in literary history when we realize his differ- 
ences from one or two of his predecessors on the one hand, and 
from some of his famous contemporaries on the other. 

Among the predecessors none are more eminent and none 
more characteristic of the eighteenth century than Pope and 
Gray. With both Wordsworth thought of himself as in antago- 
nism ; against both, at least in certain respects, he led a revolt. 
Against Pope, indeed, the revolt had begun long before Words- 
worth's day, when, in 1756, Joseph Warton published the first 
volume of his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. The 
reputation of Pope's successors, of Gray and Ossian and the 
ballad-editors, was itself a testimony to reaction against the 
Popian despotism. But Wordsworth was more than ten years 
old when Dr. Johnson published his Lives of the Poets, in which 



8 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Pope, though treated with searching critical discrimination, was 
held up as a genuine and great poet. " Let us look round upon 
the present time," cried the Doctor, " and back upon the past ; 
let us inquire to whom the voice of mankind has decreed the 
wreath of poetry ; let their productions be examined and their 
claims stated ; and the pretensions of Pope will be no more 
disputed. Had he given the world only his version [of Homer] 
the name of poet must have been allowed him." Wordsworth's 
view of Pope was very different. He admits that he had 
" melody " and " a polished style," but he considered his great 
reputation a false one. He hated personal satire, which plays 
such a large part in the poetry of Dryden and Pope ; and he 
found Pope wanting in the three essentials of poetry — passion, 
imagination, and truth to Nature. It was chiefly because of his 
lack of the last-named quality that Wordsworth was in antago- 
nism to Pope. In an admirable sentence he says that Pope 
" having wandered from humanity [in his Pastorals] with boyish 
inexperience, the praise which these compositions obtained 
tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to be trusted, 
at least in pastoral poetry." Pope, like Dryden before him, 
wrote about Nature as a man born blind might write. And 
Wordsworth's mission was to show that Nature might be 
trusted. 

" Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." 

Wordsworth's revolt against Gray was part of his revolt 
against " poetic diction." He tried, in practice and in criticism, to 
break down distinctions between expression in prose and expres- 
sion in verse ; and, rightly or wrongly, he held that Gray did 
all he could to raise and confirm such distinctions. In other 
words, he thought Gray an artificial poet, and as such, he, the 
Poet of Nature, felt obliged to treat him as a foe. 

Towards the more Romantic of his predecessors, the author 
of the Ossian poems, and the ballad-writers, and even towards 
such true landscape lovers as Thomson and Cowper, Words- 
worth was very critical. He frankly admits Thomson's inspira- 
tion ; but he says that he has a vicious style with false ornaments, 
and that he utters sentimental commonplaces. He mocks at 
Cowper for his apologetic admiration of *' that coarse object, a 
furze-bush." For Percy's Reliques, indeed, he has nothing but 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

praise. But Ossian ! Gray, whose work it is not easy to regard 
as in any sense Romantic, Gray, the most fastidious of classicists, 
was delighted with Ossian. When the first instalment appeared, 
he wrote to Horace Walpole : " Is there any more to be had of 
equal beauty, or at all approaching to it ? " And on a further 
acquaintance with the poems, he describes himself as " struck, 
extasi^y with their infinite beauty." 

Wordsworth, for his part, mercilessly tears the unhappy 
imposture to tatters ; he spurs on his somewhat sluggish rhetoric, 
and decides that the book "is essentially unnatural ... a 
forgery audacious as worthless." 

With the rank and file of Germano-British Romanticism in 
prose fiction and in verse, Wordsworth had no sympathy. 
Reformer among reformers as he was, he took a pessimistic 
view of the efforts of those who were in some respects his fellow- 
workers. Like all the reformers, he wished literature to be 
exciting and stimulating rather than formal and dull ; but he 
held that the ruck of the Romanticists used " gross and violent 
stimulants" to attain their end. He aimed at passion and 
emotion, they at sentimentalism and sensationalism ; and the 
result was a degradation of literature. " The invaluable works 
of our elder writers," he wrote in 1800, "I had almost said the 
works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by 
frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges 
of idle and extravagant stories in verse." 

Such being Wordsworth's temper, it is a matter of interest to 
observe his relation to his great poetic contemporaries, and to the 
younger men who came after them. Coleridge was his dear 
and life-long friend ; and, in Lyrical Ballads, one of the land- 
marks of Romanticism, the Ancient Mariner appeared side by 
side with the Idiot Boy and the Tintern Abbey lines. Was not 
the Aficient Mariner an "idle and extravagant story in verse," 
or was it redeemed only by Wordsworth's contributions to it, 
the tale of the shot albatross and a line or two here and there, 
and by the moral about cruelty to animals } There is no 
evidence to show that critical questions greatly disturbed 
Wordsworth's admiration of and loyalty to his "marvellous" 
colleague and friend. But we do know that Wordsworth had 
his doubts about the rank of Coleridge's most distinctively 
I Romantic poetry. We know that he considered that Coleridge's 



10 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

poetic achievement fell short of his poetic gifts ; that the in- 
felicity of his lot had shut him from that sympathy with others, 
which is granted only to long and tranquil experience, and 
without which the best poetry, which is a poetry of human 
nature, cannot be made. And we know, finally, that he regarded 
the preternatural, which counts for so much in Coleridge, as the 
pis aller of a poet who could not reach the natural. 

If Wordsworth thought thus of Coleridge's most famous 
efforts in poetry, we must be prepared to find him somewhat 
cold to others of his contemporaries. We should hardly expect 
him to find spiritual kinship in Byron, whose satirical treatment 
of him was hardly relieved by even a passing expression of 
admiration. But what of him who was in R. L. Stevenson's 
phrase, " far and away the King of the Romantics," what of 
Walter Scott ? Deep was the respect, and genuine the love 
which the two men had for one another ; and much of their 
work, surely, was done in the same field. Scott was more of a 
narrative poet than Wordsworth ; he had the externalism to 
which the narrative poet is prone, and his love of pomp and 
circumstance ; and Wordsworth recognized this. In the intro- 
duction to The White Doe of Rylstone he points out that it was 
the inwardness of historical events that interested him ; and that 
whereas Scott made events march in the orthodox manner 
towards a catastrophe, he, for his part, was content with an 
external pageantry of mere failure, so long as it might be made 
the exponent of some hidden moral victory. But surely in their 
rendering of Nature, in the loving portraiture of mountain and 
sky and flower, the two poets were in fullest sympathy and 
co-operation. Yet Wordsworth does not seem to have felt the 
sympathy. His criticism of Scott is always depreciatory, and 
he does not seem to have even dreamed of placing him in a high 
rank. He recognized Southey's great cleverness and power of 
narrative in verse ; but denied him imagination and inspiration. 
Burns he loved and reverenced ; but could never forget his 
moral shortcomings, and was curiously insensible of his lyrical 
merit. 

Keats and Shelley were a generation younger than Words- 
worth ; yet they were as truly reformers and restorers of English 
poetry as he was. In spite of occasional scofiings, they regarded 
him as a doyen ; and the three were linked together against all 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

artificiality and Philistinism in their art. Yet it does not 
appear that Wordsworth took any real interest in the work of 
his two great junior contemporaries. 

As the world knows, Wordsworth's unsympathetic critics tried 
to fix him in a circle of their own drawing. " The Lake 
School," the " Lakists," such was the circle of Francis Jeffrey's 
devising: it was a triangle rather, and denoted Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and Southey, while it connoted " lakishness," that 
is to say, poetical incompetence and triviality, parading as 
affected simplicity, and pretentious philosophy. The animus 
which Jeffrey breathed into others is dead, and the criticism 
which it moved is obsolete ; but the Lake School will live for 
ever, not as a sect, but as a noble band of pioneers, or say rather 
as a cluster of satellites about a star, whose brightness, like that 
in the prophet's vision, shines "out of the North." Nowhere 
else in Britain, save in the wizard-held borderland, has any 
limited area of soil been so definitely and solemnly set apart for, 
and consecrated to, the Muses, as that region of mountain, lake, 
and gushing streams which is shared by the three counties of 
Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancaster. Grasmere Vale, 
with its sweet lake and engirdling hills ; Windermere, with its 
islands, reaching away to the south ; the shores of Derwent- 
water under the stately bulk of Skiddaw ; these are the spots 
where the ghostly presences are thickest. It was a great 
moment in British literary annals when Wordsworth, a wanderer 
on the face of the earth, resolved to return to the place of his 
birth, and live and die there. 

" Many were the thoughts 
Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made, 
Of a known Vale, whither my feet should turn, 
Nor rest till they had reached the very door 
Of the one cottage which methought I saw." 

Nearly as memorable was the July day, six months after the 
Wordsworths settled at Grasmere, when Coleridge tried to 
become a respectable householder at Greta Hall, near Keswick. 
For to Greta Hall, three years later, came Southey ; and there 
he remained for half a century, a centre of strenuous intellectual 
life long after poor Coleridge had drifted away on his dreary 
, and discreditable course. Wordsworth and Southey were the 



12 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

two fixed points in the Lake Country to which admirers and 
settlers resorted. ' Coleridge was sometimes to be seen. Thomas 
de Quincey, like Coleridge an opium-eater, one of Wordsworth's 
sympathetic exponents in the ears of an unbelieving generation, 
came to be his neighbour for about twenty years. Shelley took 
his first wife to Keswick and tried, though in vain, to become 
something of a Lakist. To the shores of Windermere, came 
" Christopher North " and Mrs. Hemans, both well within 
Wordsworth's circle. Hardly could that be said of Harriet 
Martineau, who nevertheless was Wordsworth's fairly intimate 
neighbour for a few years. But it might surely be said of 
Thomas Arnold, the great headmaster of Rugby, who was lord 
of Fox How and Wordsworth's true friend from 1832 to his 
sudden death ten years later. Whatever share Wordsworth's 
influence may have had in bringing John Ruskin to spend the 
afternoon and evening of his days on Coniston Water, it is 
legitimate to remark on the fitting juxtaposition of the two 
men who, more than any other Englishmen of the nineteenth 
century, or perhaps in any age, were the interpreters of Nature's 
message to mankind. 

The poet who dwelt in so imperial a solitude and in so royal 
a company remains, after the criticism of a hundred years has 
done its worst and best on him, somewhat of an enigmatical 
figure. That which the blunt insensibility of the early critics 
scorned as " lakishness," was undoubtedly there, in the man, his 
genius and his work ; and, though we no longer scorn it, we are 
sometimes daunted and sometimes perplexed by it. In the 
climate of poetry we expect sunshine and balmy airs ; in 
Wordsworth we feel, now and again, a chill and blight which 
spoil one's pleasure. Whence come this east wind and these 
dull skies ? Why does Wordsworth's poetry seem so unequal 
in value, so apt to fail in charm ? How can one vsrho some- 
times, who often, rises so high, sink at times so low ? How 
should so transcendent and so inartificial a poet fail to know 
when he is writing mere dull prose in conventional form of 
verse? Or is it we, his readers, who are at fault, and not 
Wordsworth } Is it only that we are but partially initiated, 
and that, with more perfectly purged ears, we should hear 
nothing but music ? 

These questions are put only that they may be deprecated 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

and dismissed. It is best to take Wordsworth as he took him- 
self, quite seriously, and to dwell with him for a season, not so 
much that we may reconsider him critically, not that we may 
make a new attempt to " place " him, not that we may sift what 
we like in his poetry from what we dislike, but that we may 
know him as he was, and try to be worthy of his friendship. 

Some things we shall do well to grasp firmly at the outset. 
There were certain features in Wordsworth which give a kind 
of gnarled structure to his character and his poetry. He insisted 
on reconciling and combining certain things which are often 
kept apart, and which some people think should always be kept 
apart. Imagination and morality are two such things. In 
i Wordsworth's estimation, imagination was the mainspring of 
poetry. When he speaks about imagination in prose, Words- 
worth tries to be logical and precise ; but when he speaks of it 
in poetry, he uses language of that vaguely adumbrative kind 
which one has to be content with in presence of transcendent 
religious ideas. And, indeed, Wordsworth's feeling about 
imagination was ^«^j-/-religious. Imagination was creative energy, 
in using which the poet was transmitting Divine power. And 
so has many another poet thought of it — so far, at least, as its 
prerogatives go. Many poets and many critics have claimed 
for genius the absolutism of a Divine right, as though it could 
make its own rules or dispense with rules of any kind ; as if it 
had its own atmosphere and independent criteria. But no such 
claim did Wordsworth make. For him imagination had rules as 
stringent as its power was divine. Not for one instant did he 
conceive of his art as exercised in a non-moral way, represent- 
ing, without any preference that was not purely aesthetic, the 
facts of life for pleasure's sake only. Wordsworth's morality 
makes him enigmatic and hard to approach. There would be 
no enigma in the matter if we could class him as a didactic 
poet, as one who simply sought to recommend religion and 
morality in good verse. From some of his writing about his 
own work, some of the letters in which he spoke with least 
formality about his own purposes, we might almost conclude 
that he aimed at nothing but the crudest didacticism. But, if 
his achievement had been of this kind, his name might have 
been conspicuous in the annals of morality and religion, but 
could not have stood where all men now find it, in the front 



14 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

rank of English poetry. When Wordsworth thought carefully 
about his poetry, he made it plain that its object was artistic ; 
he spoke of pleasure as his end, with a frankness which might 
satisfy the most ardent devotee of art for art's sake. And 
indeed his practice speaks as eloquently as his theory. In all 
his central poetic work he sings of the human and the Divine 
at their meeting-points with the vagueness of the poet, not the 
definiteness of the moralist or theologian. Yet it is not always 
so ; occasions are frequent when he seems to lapse into the 
didactic ; when the mood which he creates is too serious to be 
called pleasure, and the truth which he enforces is too austere to 
be called beauty. And the reader of Wordsworth will often 
be embarrassed by the apparently conflicting efforts of such 
imagination as Shakespeare might have done obeisance to, and 
such mere moral reflectiveness as seems anything but imagina- 
tive. He is troubled by an uncomfortable antithesis between 
philosophy and profit ; and he is surprised that the poet seems 
to have felt so little the discomfort that is so irksome to him. 
He wonders whether Wordsworth's imagination acted inter- 
mittently ; whether his genius was a kind of mechanical mixture 
of gold and clay ; or whether a more patient and intense study 
may not show some higher unity in which the contradiction is 
resolved. 

Another knot in the Wordsworthian structure which forces 
the reader to exert himself, is the political element in his genius 
and poetry. He has to realize, in fact, that the two cardinal 
things in Wordsworth are his passion for Nature and his passion 
for public liberty, and that the latter passion is as strong as the 
former. He once told an American visitor, the Rev. Orville , 
Dewey, that he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition I 
and prospects of society for one to poetry ; and we can believe 
it. We find that, strictly speaking, even Wordsworth's best 
poetry of Nature has a social and political source ; that not 
until the impulses of his boyhood had been chastened by social , 
experience and political shocks, was he able to interpret Nature 
at all. The whole of his early manhood was determined by 
England's active hostility to France ; by the shock and the ' 
shame of finding his country at war — so it seemed to him — with 
the struggle for liberty of a neighbouring land. His best poetry 
was made as the result of, and in reaction from, that shock ; 



II 



il 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

through it mainly he heard "the still, sad music of humanity;" 
and he first truly knew Nature as the healer of a soul thus 
suffering. Not less true is it, though perhaps less widely known, 
that the main bent of his genius in middle life was determined 
by another political shock, the revelation of the aims of Napoleon. 
A common, and not wholly erroneous, way of putting this 
matter is to represent Wordsworth as having changed his 
political opinions from something not far short of republicanism 
to a Toryism that would admit no thought of compromise. 
But the change was more dramatic. No reader of the Sonnets 
Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty can miss the 
wonderful ring of their passionate patriotism, or will be surprised 
to learn that such passion had a powerful and very definite cause. 
It was in 1793 that Wordsworth's love of England was shocked 
by her hostility to the French Revolution ; it was in 1807, when 
he knew that Swiss liberty had been destroyed by Napoleon, 
that his sympathies forsook a nation which could suffer its 
destinies to be moulded by such a tyrant. Even as late as 
September, 1806, the solemn hymn on the dying of Charles James 
Fox shows that Wordsworth was not alienated from the states- 
man whose sympathy with the French had been so constant. 
When the Genius of Liberty, the " High-souled Maid," was 
driven from the sound of her Alpine torrent, the poet's patriotism 
became less anxious and more passionate ; but it was none 
the less a passion for freedom and the impartial sway of 
righteous law. 

Then, when the tyrant was overthrown, the passion fell, 
and the poet passed into that mood of undisturbed tranquillity 
with which we most easily associate him. In theory he had 
always insisted on tranquillity as the necessary solvent of poetic 
emotion ; he defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity, 
and he had always, in some measure, realized the theory. For 
•the last twenty-five or thirty years of his life, the pulse of 
emotion was feeble, and there seemed little but tranquil reflec- 
tion left. These uncertain relations between emotion and 
tranquillity make a difficulty for the student of Wordsworth. 
The idea of Browning's Lost Leader haunts him ; and though 
,he may have no word of political blame for the eager revolu- 
tionist who became so stern a Conservative, he can hardly 
;help feeling that the poet whom he hailed as the herald of a 



16 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

new age seemed to become a mere holder of forlorn hopes, 
a timid and obstinate opponent of essays towards freedom in 
almost all directions. 

It is, indeed, at once Wordsworth's weakness and his glory 
that the tranquillity of his genius put him to some extent out 
of sympathy with the adventurous temper of the nineteenth 
century. For if it is part of the business of a great poet to 
lead the van in the conflict of his age, it is surely not alien from 
his office to proclaim the peace which passeth all understanding 
apart from which the stress of battle would be unendurable ; 
to sing in the ears of a generation much given to change of " a 
repose which ever is the same." Wordsworth lived long enough 
to witness many reactions ; and perhaps, when we know him 
better, we shall come to feel that both flow and ebb were less 
marked in him than in the periods in which he lived. Perhaps, 
as in fancy we grow with his growth, share his companionship 
and compare our poet with contemporary leaders of thought 
and action as they speak for themselves, we shall learn to rate 
higher that perfect self-control, those "sober certainties," that 
philosophic mind which were the conquest of Wordsworth's 
years. We may find that the conquest was won earlier than 
we knew or he realized, and that the thought which underlies 
his work from first to last was more timeless and less dependent 
upon either external events or changes of mood than at first 
sight appears. Wordsworth was, after all, a philosopher ; and 
it is a poor philosophy which does not transcend the changing 
appearances of the time in which it utters itself. 

One thing the associate of Wordsworth is sure to feel as a 
mere drawback, and that is his lack of humour. Probably this 
lack, so common yet always so lamentable, apparently so un- 
important but really so far-reaching in its power of hindrance 
and harm, is one of the chief sources of what is unpleasant in 
the "lakishness" of Wordsworth. It makes it possible to 
feel his poetry old-fashioned: an epithet complimentary to 
furniture and landscape-gardening, but hardly to poetry. For 
poetry, at all events of the rank of Wordsworth's, should always 
be fresh, fresh with the eternal freshness of the spring or the 
morning. And if this freshness, this unmistakable, inexpress- 
ible, irresistible gusto is sometimes lacking in Wordsworth, is it 
not very often because humour is weak ? For humour is much 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

more than the parent of wit, though this is not to be despised 
in poetry. It is a phase of inteUigence, an exercise of sym- 
pathy ; and the lack of it involves, possibly earnestness, but cer- 
tainly dulness, and some insensitiveness, both of the understand- 
ing and the affections. Such insensitiveness was undoubtedly 
present in Wordsworth ; and it prevented the man, as it pre- 
vents his poetry, from being wholly and unfailingly fresh 
and charming. It explains also the occasional lapses into 
individual self-satisfaction which flaw the noble self-conscious- 
ness of the great poet. For humour, even better than humility, 
makes a man immune from the possibility of conceit. 

Wordsworth's fame, like his genius, suffered great vicissitudes. 
" Forty and seven years it is," wrote De Quincey in 1845, " since 
William Wordsworth first appeared as an author {i.e. since the 
publication of Lyrical Ballads). Twenty of those years he was 
the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. 
Since then, and more than once. Senates have rung with 
acclamations to the echo of his name." But as to one phase 
of his life there was no vicissitude. From a certain day in his 
eager youth, of which we shall hear in the next chapter, when 
on his way home from a night of innocent pleasure through 
growing light he passed through one of those decisive crises 
which few men and women with souls are unfortunate enough 
to miss, Wordsworth was the priest and prophet of Nature, almost 
exclusively identified with the lakeland of Northern England. 
There he was born ; thither, before his youth had quite faded, 
he returned ; there he lay down to die ; there, under its modest 
headstone, rests his dust. All else, Cambridge, London, France, 
even happy and fruitful hours in Dorset and Somerset, was 
either education or episode. One cannot know Wordsworth 
without understanding the English Lakes. 



CHAPTER II 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 

IN a passage of fine, lucid, old-fashioned prose Wordsworth 
himself has described the main features of the English 
lakeland. He asks the reader "to place himself, in imagina- 
tion, on some given point ; let it be the top of either of the 
mountains. Great Gavel, or Scawfell ; or, rather, let us suppose 
our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two 
mountains, at not more than half a mile's distance from the 
summit of each, and not many yards above their highest eleva- 
tion ; we shall there see stretched at our feet a number of 
valleys, not fewer than eight, diverging from the point on which 
we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel. 
First, we note, lying to the south-east, the vale of Langdale, 
which will conduct the eye to the long lake of Winandermere, 
stretched nearly to the sea ; or rather to the sands of the vast 
bay of Morecambe, serving here for the rim of this imaginary 
wheel ; let us trace it in a direction from the south-east towards 
the south, and we shall next fix our eyes upon the vale of 
Coniston, running up likewise from the sea, but not (as all the 
other valleys do) to the nave of the wheel, and therefore it may 
be not inaptly represented as a broken spoke sticking in the 
rim. Looking forth again ... we see immediately at our feet 
the vale of Duddon. . . . The fourth vale, next to be observed, 
viz. that of the Esk, is of the same general character as the 
last. . . . Next, almost due west, look down into, and along the 
deep valley of Wastdale, with its little chapel and . . . neat 
dwellings scattered upon a plain of meadow and corn-ground. . . . 
Beyond the little fertile plain lies, within a bed of steep moun- 
tains, the long, narrow, stern, and desolate lake of Wastdale. . . . 
Next comes in view Ennerdale, with its lake of bold and 

i8 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 19 

somewhat savage shores. . . . The vale of Buttermere, with the 
lake and village of that name, and Crum mock-water, beyond, next 
present themselves. We will follow the main stream, the Coker, 
through the fertile and beautiful vale of Lorton, till it is lost in 
the Derwent, below the noble ruins of Cockermouth Castle. 
Lastly, Borrowdale, of which the vale of Keswick is only a 
continuation, stretching due north, brings us to a point nearly 
opposite to the vale of Winandermere, with which we began. . . . 
The image of a wheel, thus far exact, is little more than one-half 
complete ; but the deficiency on the eastern side may be supplied 
by the vales of Wytheburn, Ullswater, Haweswater, and the vale 
of Grasmere and Rydal ; none of these, however, run up to the 
central point. . . . From this take a flight of not more than 
four or five miles eastward to the ridge of Helvellyn, and you 
will look down upon Wytheburn and St. John's Vale, which are 
a branch of the vale of Keswick ; upon Ullswater, stretching 
due east ; and not far beyond to the south-east . . . lie the vale 
and lake of Haweswater ; and lastly, the vale of Grasmere, 
Rydal, and Ambleside, brings you back to Winandermere." 

The mere symmetry of this region, however, is nothing to 
its concentration, to the thick sowing and close company of its 
beauties. Surely on no other equally small space of the earth's 
surface is there such unity in variety ; nowhere are there such a 
majestic type and such delightful surprises. Wordsworth's 
" image of a wheel " gives no idea of the wealth and intricate 
grouping of mountains, the abundance of lakes, the individuality 
of valleys. And though three counties contribute, the result, in 
mere area, is so small ! For we must not think of the highlands 
of the West Riding, the wild hills and dales of the Pennines, as 
part of the Lake District. Physically and spiritually, regarded 
either geologically or scenically, they lie outside it. The 
sweeping, lakeless dales of Western Yorkshire with the slopes 
of mountain limestone that bound them, belong to another order 
of things from the Silurian uplands and big volcanic and granitic 
hills enclosing the lakes and tarns, and sending down the 
hurrying " becks " of Westmorland and Cumberland. The 
valley of the Lune, which joins the sea below Lancaster, or 
the main line of the London and North Western Railway may 
be held to mark, with practical, though not with geological, 
accuracy, the slight but most real boundary. At Kendal, or at 



20 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Penrith, you stand outside the Lakes, just as you do on the flat 
wastes of Morecambe or of Solway. The whole of little West- 
morland, a protruding tongue of Lancashire, a bit of Cumber- 
land : that is all. " O Love," the poets might have apostrophized 
their paradise, 

" O Love, thy province were not large, 
A bounded field, nor stretching far." 

The central point of the region is the pleasant little 
mountain town of Ambleside in Westmorland. Stand just out- 
side it, or look down on it from high ground on either side of 
Windermere, and you see the heart of the district laid open 
before you. Seeming close to the lake, though a short mile 
from the actual wash of its waters, the dark houses lie at the 
very bases of the mountains, and the valleys stretch away from 
the quiet streets. Far to the west, you catch a glimpse of the 
highest height of all, the highest height in England — Scafell 
Pike and its neighbour Scafell. Belonging, for the eye at least, 
to the same group, are the Coniston Fells, dear to Ruskin, and 
the two knobs of the Langdale Pikes. These are the " lusty 
twins " on which the ** Solitary " of Wordsworth's Excursion 
looked from his cottage-window by Blea Tarn, and those who 
know the Lakes at all feel, like him, that they are " prized com- 
panions." Let us learn at once to associate them with the 
great lines in which their spiritual meaning is given. 

" Many are the notes 
Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth 
From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores ; 
And well those lofty brethren bear their part 
In the wild concert — chiefly when the storm 
Rides high ; then all the upper air they fill 
With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow, 
Like smoke, along the level of the blast. 
In mighty current ; theirs, too, is the song 
Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails ; 
And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon, 
Methinks that I have heard them echo back 
The thunder's greeting. Nor have Nature's laws 
Left them ungifted with a power to yield 
Music of finer tone ; a harmony, 
So do I call it, though it be the hand 
Of silence, though there be no voice ; — the clouds, 
The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 21 

Motions of moonlight, all come thither — 

Touch, and have an answer— thither come, and shape 

A language not unwelcome to sick hearts 

And idle spirits : — there the sun himself. 

At the calm close of summer's longest day, 

Rests his substantial orb ; — between those heights 

And on the top of either pinnacle, 

More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault, 

Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud. 

Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man 

Than the mute agents stirring there." 

Before we turn our eyes away from the Langdales and their 
peers, let us see what the Solitary saw there one day at the 
clearing of a mist. 

" A step 
A single step, that freed me from the skirts 
Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
By waking sense or by the dreaming soul ! 
The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
A wilderness of building, sinking far 
And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth. 
Far sinking into splendour — without end ! 
Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, 
With alabaster domes and silver spires, 
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright. 
In avenues disposed ; there, towers begirt 
With battlements that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
Upon the dark materials of the storm 
Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves 
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
The vapours had receded, taking these 

Their station under a cerulean sky. 
Oh, 'twas an unimaginable sight ! 
Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf, 
Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky. 
Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed, 
Molten together, and composing thus 
Each lost in each, that marvellous array 
Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge 
Fantastic pomp of structure without name. 
In fleecy folds voluminous, enwrapped. 



22 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Right in the midst, where interspace appeared 

Of open court, an object like a throne 

Under a shining canopy of state 

Stood fixed ; and fixed resemblances were seen 

To implements of ordinary use, 

But vast in size, in substance glorified ; 

Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld 

In vision-forms uncouth of mightiest power 

For admiration and mysterious awe. 

This little Vale, a dwelling-place of Man, 

Lay low beneath my feet ; 'twas visible — 

I saw not, but I felt that it was there. 

That which I saw was the revealed abode 

Of spirits in beatitude : my heart 

Swelled in my breast — ' I have been dead,' I cried, 

'And now I live ! '" 

The soft velvety valley along which the eye travels to the 
Langdales is the valley of the Brathay ; and from its heights 
there descends to the westward that " River Duddon,'* to which 
Wordsworth was to write so many sonnets. Loughrigg, with 
its many memories, divides it from the valley of the Rothay or 
Rotha, a valley which seems to lead straight north to the 
gloomy bulk of Fairfield. A nearer view would show that it is 
the Rydal stream which comes from those formidable heights, 
and that the Rothay comes from the north-westward. It 
comes, in fact, from Helvellyn through Grasmere, which is 
folded among the hills under Dun mail Raise, over which you 
can see the gray thread of road making towards Thirlmere and 
Keswick. To the right of that road you catch a glimpse of the 
top of Helvellyn. On the other, eastern side of Fairfield beyond 
Wansfell, you see another road climbing to a summit : that 
is Kirkstone Pass, leading to UUswater. Other hills, below 
the gigantic dimensions of Fairfield and Helvellyn, but how 
rich in story ! — come out clear. There is Nab Scar below 
Fairfield, where Wordsworth's ghost, and Dorothy'Sj must walk ; 
there, looking down on Grasmere from the west, is Silver How ; 
and there, further north, keeping guard over Easedale, is the 
Helm, with the Old Woman crouching on the top. In that one 
view (and you need spend no long time over it) you will 
embrace the central features of the district. One other bit of 
Wordsworth's most fanciful verse will fix them for us. It is 
from that poem On the Naming of Places addressed To Joanna^ 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 23 

and describes the effect of a wild girl's laughter among the hills. 
The poet was admiring the view from Grasmere : — 

" When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, 
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld 
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. 
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, 
Took up the lady's voice, and laughed again ; 
That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag 
Was ready with her cavern ; Hammar-scar, 
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth 
A noise of laughter ; southern Loughrigg heard, 
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone ; 
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky 
Carried the Lady's voice, — old Skiddaw blew 
His speaking-trumpet ; — back out of the clouds 
Of Glaramara southward came the voice ; 
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head." 

The mention of Skiddaw and Glaramara reminds us, as we 
look over Ambleside to the mountains, of what lies beyond the 
barrier. From the heights of Glaramara the streams descend 
northwards ; and, in particular, the Derwent, flowing through 
Borrowdale, expands into Derwentwater, the most perfect, 
perhaps, of all the lakes ; rushes past Keswick, where it is joined 
by the Greta from Thirlmere ; disappears in the long lake of 
Bassenthwaite, and thence flows in a pleasant valley to the Irish 
Sea at Workington. All this region, with Borrowdale and the 
Vale of St. John as its avenues of approach, is dominated by the 
great granitic masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara with their 
bare sides. Neither of these can be seen from our view-point 
near Ambleside ; and the places on which they look are not 
rich in central Wordsworthian associations. They belong rather 
to Coleridge and Southey — to Coleridge, who found out Greta 
Hall on its mound by the Greta just outside Keswick, and to 
Southey, who spent in that house half a century of quiet and 
laborious days. Yet Skiddaw and the Derwent were dear to 
Wordsworth, and for a very good reason. 

Halfway between Keswick and Workington, where the 
Derwent flows, broad and tranquil, but still with quick pace 
and whence the outlines of Skiddaw are blue with the haze of 
distance, stands the market-town of Cockermouth. You can 
see at once that it has a busy present-day life, and also that it is 



24 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

rich in associations with a distant past. Its broad main street 
is both busy and dignified ; its two streams (Derwent and its 
tributary the Cocker, which comes from Buttermere and her 
neighbour lakes) feed some busy mills, while from the high 
ground on the right of the rivers, the remains of a mediaeval 
castle look down. On your right, as you walk along the main 
street westward, you come upon a house which is evidently, 
even now, the handsomest house in the town. It is not a 
poetical house ; indeed, its many windowed frontage, its high 
walls and heavy gates almost suggest a public institution rather 
than a home. Behind it, a garden slopes shortly down to the 
Derwent. 

In that house, unchanged since then, Wordsworth was born 
in 1770, on April 7th. His father, Richard Wordsworth, was an 
attorney, well to do, as the character of his house testifies, and 
agent to the Lord Lonsdale of his time. The Wordsworths were 
Yorkshire people, the poet's grandfather, father of the Cocker- 
mouth attorney, being the first immigrant into lake-land. 
Richard, the attorney, strengthened his hold on the district by 
marrying Anne Cookson of Penrith, the daughter of a tradesman 
there, who had, however, tempered his civic blood by taking to 
wife a Crackanthorp of Newbiggen Hall. At Cockermouth 
were also born the rest of Richard Wordsworth's children, an 
elder brother of the poet, Richard, a London attorney, who 
died in 18 16; Dorothy, a year and a half younger than 
William ; John, the sailor, of whom we shall hear much in the 
sequel ; and Christopher, the Master of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, from 1820 to 1841. He died in 1846, four years before 
his brother. He was the father of two bishops, Christopher, 
Bishop of Lincoln, and Charles, Bishop of St. Andrews ; and 
grandfather of Dr. John Wordsworth, the present (1907) bishop 
of Salisbury. 

Wordsworth was thus a northerner to the core, a child hardy 
and hard-featured. Yorkshire blood, Westmorland blood : the 
dales and the fells and the rapid brooks ; such was the material, 
such were the surroundings, the nursery, of this austere and yet 
most English poet, of this nobly conventional, yet most fearlessly 
natural soul. There was nothing in the near neighbourhood of 
Cockermouth to pamper poetic taste ; Skiddaw and Blenca- 
thara were too far off, and the fields and uplands were tame. 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 25 

Two things only there were which breathed romance ; the high- 
pitched castle of the thirteenth century, where Mary Stewart 
was harboured after Langside and her landing at Workington ; 
and the broad and clear waters of the Derwent with their 
tidings of the lakes and hills. The child made the most of 
both. He chased butterflies on the castle-hill; he rejoiced in 
the yellow summer-flowers that shone^ on its green slopes ; he 
ventured awestruck into the darkness of its dungeon. Coming 
back as an old man he hears the spirit of the place speak to 
him. 

" Thou look'st upon me, and dost fondly think, 
Poet ! that, stricken as both are by years. 
We, differing once so much, are now Compeers, 
Prepared, when each has stood his time, to sink 
Into the dust. Erewhile a sterner link 
United us ; when thou, in boyish play, 
Entering my dungeon, didst become a prey 
To soul-appalling darkness. Not a blink 
Of light was there ; — and thus did I, thy Tutor, 
Make thy young thoughts acquainted with the grave ; 
While those went chasing the winged butterfly 
Through my green courts ; or climbing, a bold suitor, 
Up to the flowers whose golden progeny 
Still round my shattered brow in beauty wave." 

The romance of the river, with its living voice, was more 
congenial to this child. It was born in the eagle's haunts ; in 
its modest valley, it kept green a wreath fairer than that of the 
proudest Roman conqueror. To the imagination of the man it 
was " the fairest of all rivers ; " its voice, as he said, " flowed 
along" the dreams of his childhood. Into the streets, with their 
" fretful dwellings," it breathed something of Nature's own calm. 
The garden of the big house sloped down to the blue stream, 
and was " a tempting playmate." In its backwaters the little 
boy would bathe all day long, and then scamper about among 
the ragwort on its sandy fields like a naked savage. It was, as 
he said, " fair seed-time " for his soul ; and he grew up " fostered 
by beauty." 

When school-time arrived, he went a step nearer the central 
beauty. Let us go back for a moment to our view-point on the 
high ground south of Ambleside. Hitherto, so fascinated have 
we been by the mountain panorama to the north, that we have 



26 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

given no look or thought to the expanse of Windermere behind 
us, to the low, soft heights that make its banks ; its islands, and 
its woods to the water's edge. Nor have we lingered long on 
the Coniston Fells and the "Old Man," so strong was the 
attraction of the Langdale Pikes just beyond them. Cross 
Windermere by its famous ferry, just south of the largest of 
the islands, and then climb the heights westward, as if you were 
making for the Coniston Fells. You are in that bit of Lanca- 
shire which helps to form the Lake district ; and, for a time, 
when a turn of the road has banished the last visible fragment 
of Windermere, you seem quite removed from all the ordinary 
associations of the Lakes. Suddenly, as you dip down west- 
ward, you drop upon an unexciting lake with rushy banks, 
parallel to Windermere, along which the road runs northward. 
It is Esthwaite Water. Follow the road the full length of the 
lake, and you become aware of a large village of dark grey 
houses climbing towards a long church on a hill, looking like an 
island in the flats by which the lake is bounded on the north. 
Entering the village, you have a sense of much quaintness, and 
also of some importance. There are real streets in the place, 
climbing and twisting curiously, with archways thrown across 
here and there. Above all there is the dominance of the long 
church with its graveyard on the hill. As you stand by its 
door you see that you have much the same view as you had 
before. For there in front of you is the great mountain-barrier ; 
there is the central paradise. 

This large village, or little town, is Hawkshead. At the 
eastern foot of the church-hill you see school buildings, some old, 
some recently restored. The Hawkshead grammar-school is an 
old and famous foundation. It was founded in 1585 by Edwin 
Sandys, Archbishop of York, one of the most praiseworthy of the 
Elizabethan divines, and in the eighteenth century had a high 
reputation in the north. To Hawkshead school all the Words- 
worth boys were sent; and William was there from 1778 when 
he was eight, until 1787, when he was sixteen, and went up to 
St. John's College, Cambridge. He was boarded with a dame 
called Ann Tyson, in a house by one of the archways. 

Wordsworth's school life was very important in his spiritual 
development, and it is clearly reflected in his poetry. He 
learned much from his excellent schoolmasters ; much from the 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 27 

wholesome conditions of normal companionship and boyish 
sport ; most of all from that teaching of Nature in which the 
waters and shores of Esthwaite carried on the lessons of 
Derwent. In the psychology of poetic adolescence, as a study 
of the degrees by which a rather ordinary boy climbs, and 
climbs naturally, to be a poet, nothing could be more significant 
than Wordsworth's school-time at Hawkshead. He went there 
a healthy, rather passionate child ; he left it still healthy, still 
passionate, but with new elements of health and fresh food for 
passion. His simplest experiences in that plain village, by 
that tame lake, were part of a most transcendent training, and 
some of them are among the permanent poetic riches of the 
race. Even Ann Tyson, and her cottage by the archway, the 
little boy's second nursery, went beyond themselves in their 
mission. " Why should I speak," Wordsworth asks — 

"Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts 
Have felt, and every man alive can guess ? " 

Yet it was well, even for a great poet, to record the charm of 
that cottage home, the stone table under the pine tree, the 
imprisoned brook in the garden, the moon seen from the 
boy's bed — 

" In splendour couched among the leaves 
Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood " ; 

how, 

" In the dark summit of the waving tree, 
She rocked with every impulse of the breeze," 

for these simple sensuous impressions were the first stage of a 
spiritual experience such as had never before been told, they were 
the alphabet of that poetry of common life which it was Words- 
worth's mission to add to the poetry of the world. 

Nearer the heart of things was the idealization of one of the 
Hawkshead teachers, that mysterious village schoolmaster, 
** with hair of glittering gray," that " Matthew " who never lived, 
save for the poet himself, and his lovers, that " delicate creation '* 
of the poet's mind for which a worthy concrete man supplied 
the initial suggestion. The Rev. William Taylor, we have 
every reason to believe, an M.A. of Cambridge, and headmaster 
of Hawkshead School from 1782 to 1786, was one, and only 



28 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

one, of Matthew's prototypes. He died while Wordsworth was 
at school, and the poet has made the circumstances of his death 
poetically memorable. But it is the abstract " Matthew " who 
has the true immortality, and who walks still in the vale of 
Esthwaite, and will walk, we may predict, for ever. He is the 
eternal type of that rare and exquisite thing, age as companion 
on equal terms of youth : he stands, too, for the moral triumph 
of cheerful serenity over the pathos of long survival and the 
memories of ancient sorrow. Wordsworth introduces his name 
as inscribed on a tablet in the school. He pauses on it, and 
recalls the personality, its lights and shadows. 

" The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs 
Of one tired out with fun and madness ; 
The tears which came to Matthew's eyes 
Were tears of Hght, the deed of gladness. 

" Yet sometimes, when the secret cup 

Of still and serious thought went round, 
It seemed as if he drank it up — 
He felt with spirit so profound." 

It was Matthew, and it was by Esthwaite Lake — 

" When life was sweet, I knew not why," 

who rallied William Wordsworth on his dreaminess, and was 
answered (so in afterthought it seemed), in the technical 
phraseology of the new philosophy of Nature. 

" The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
Against or with our will. 

" Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness. 

" Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
Of things for ever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come, 
But we must still be seeking ? 

" Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, 
Conversing as I may, 
I sit upon this old grey stone, 
And dream my time away." 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 29 

In "memory's shadowy moonshine" this mystical school- 
master more and more took the shape of Wordsworth's typical 
elemental person, the plain countryman in a simple beautiful 
place, who knows, the better for his simplicity, the heights and 
depths of joy and sorrow. To Matthew belong the twin-poems, 
The Two April Mornings and The Fountain, written in 1799, 
which breathe the purest Wordsworthianism, and which are 
relevant here because they show what came of early Hawks- 
head impressions. 

If ordinary companionship led to these extraordinary poetic 
results, so the boyish occupations and sports of the Hawkshead 
scholar were a natural initiation into the metaphysics of poetry. 
The mere external details of those days are given in The 
Prelude with the reminiscent garrulity of autobiographic blank 
verse. We are told of skating, nutting, dancing, loo or whist 
parties on winter nights, woodcock-catching by moonlight. But 
we are also told (and this is what interests us, this is what 
makes the autobiography poetic), how this ordinary boyish 
experience turned out to be the training of a poet's soul. 

In the poem called Nuttings for example, which was intended 
to be part of the Prehide, we are shown how things seen lead to 
those things which are not seen, but are of the eternity of poetry. 
Years afterwards, when the poet thought over happy days 
imong the hazel-coppices on the borders of Esthwaite, he 
remembered one day in particular — a red-letter day in the 
tiistory of his feeling for Nature. Regarded merely sensuously, 
the day was delicious — 

" It seems a day 

(I speak of one from many singled out) 
One of those heavenly days that cannot die." 

Well protected by shabby clothes against the terrors of 
thickets, the boy entered the autumnal woods, bent on ravage. 
In their depths was — 

" One dear nook 
Unvisited, where not a broken bough 
Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign 
Of devastation ; but the hazels rose 
Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung 
A virgin scene ! " 



so WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

For a time the young deflowerer watched his victim in 
mood of perfect sensuous satisfaction — 

" A little while I stood 
Breathing with such suppression of the heart 
As joy delights in ; and with wise restraint 
Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed 
The banquet." 

He was — 

" In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to play 
Tribute to ease ; and of its joy secure, 
The heart luxuriates with indifferent things 
Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones 
And on the vacant air." 

And now the boy summons his energies to do the common 
place thing — 

" Then up I rose 
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash, 
And merciless ravage ; and the shady nook 
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, 
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up 
Their quiet being." 

So far, we have a most ordinary situation, distinguished only! 
by the beauty of its presentment. But now mark what happens. 
In the moment of full sensuous gratification, when the clusters' 
are at his feet, and the ruined trees are quivering from the| 
robbery, the boy feels — or is it that the man, the developed' 
poet, reads his present feelings back into the boy's .? — a strange j 
compunction. There suddenly dawns on his acquisitive, 
materialistic soul, the vision of Nature as life — life which is 
an end in itself, and not a mere instrument of human gratifica-j 
tion. He thinks of his act not as gain, but as injury — some- 
thing that has hurt, something to be resented, regretted. 

" Ere from the mutilated bower I turned 
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, 
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky." 

And so, recalling it all long afterwards, he exhorts Dorothy, 
who, surely, had little need of the exhortation — 

" Then, dearest maiden, move along these shades, 
In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand 
Touch — for there is a spirit in the woods." 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 31 

" There is a spirit in tJie woods." This, which in other poets 
might be a mere play of illusory fancy, is, in Wordsworth, a 
dogmatic statement of objective fact. 

The same kind of spiritualizing process took place with 
school-companionships. Common schoolboys, like common 
schoolmasters, were touched by, and became part of, the unearthly 
sublimity of Nature. " William Raincock, of Rayrigg," was an 
adept in the art of mimicking owls by hooting through his 
fingers ; and he died before he was twelve. Wordsworth 
idealizes him and his accomplishment and his fate, so that they 
are as much part of Windermere as its waters or its woods. 

*' There was a Boy ; ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
And islands of Winander ! " 

Wonderful as were the effects of echoing sound which the 
lad could produce, there were moments when he failed, when — 

" There came 'a pause 
Of silence, such as baffled his best skill ! " 

At such moments the Spirit of Nature laid her hand on him, 
and play was changed into poetry — 

" Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain-torrents ; or the visible scenes 
Would enter unawares into his mind 
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake." 

And if this trivial experience was replete with spiritual 
suggestion even to the child, much more so was the sight of 
his untimely grave to the poet, his friend. The Hawkshead 
churchyard — 

" Hangs 

Upon a slope above the village school ; 

And, through that churchyard when my way has led 

On summer evenings, I believe, that there 

A long half-hour together I have stood 

Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies ! " 

In other experiences the imaginative and spiritual training 
vas more direct and decisive. The sense of something behind 



32 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

natural appearances, of a spiritual unity at once beautiful, awful, 
and incomprehensible, was born out of one experience after 
another. When the boy was going at night round the wood- 
cock-snares set by him and his companions, he would be 
tempted to take more than his own share, and then he would 
fancy himself pursued by invisible feet, and the night-breeze 
would play the detective. So might any guilty boy feel. But 
not every boy, climbing the rocks to see a raven's nest in broad 
daylight, would suspect, as Wordsworth did, the preternatural 
(shall we call it .?) in the natural. 

*' While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, 
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
Blow through my ear ! — the sky seemed not a sky 
Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds ! " 

Gradually the sense strengthened of spiritual depth in 
Nature, of natural appearances as symbolic and prophetic. The 
boating and skating scenes on Esthwaite and Windermere are 
well known. One summer evening the boy shot out in 
a boat on Esthwaite in defiance of rules. Moonlight lay on 
the water — 

" Far above 
Was nothing but the stars and the gray sky." 

The consciousness of wrong-doing was present but not 
strong ; it was an element, but only one element, of an emotional 
excitement in which it disappeared. In the glamour of the 
night, the boy made towards " a craggy ridge " on the horizon : 
suddenly there shot up behind it, as if on the impulse of a living 
will, a higher height, a peak black in the moonlight. As it 
grew in size and definiteness it became a terrifying thing ; and 
at last young Wordsworth had to turn his boat and go back, 
feeling all the while as if "the grim shape" were following him. 
In serious mood he walked across the meadows to Hawkshead ; 
and for days he could not lose the impressions of that night. 

What were the impressions ? He tells us ; but it is not easy 
to translate such things into words with their irritating and 
impotent definiteness. His healthy boy's brain was troubled 
with a sense of the undetermined, the unknown ; Nature seemed 
to wear no longer her simple, pleasant, intelligible features, but 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 33 

to be haunted by " huge and mighty forms," gigantic presences, 
alive, but not with the life of men. 

So it seemed at the moment ; but, years afterwards, he came 
to know, and to be able to express better, what was happening 
to him at such times. He came to realize that this vague feeling 
of ghostliness among the things of sense was the childish appre- 
hension of nothing less than Deity in Nature, of the " Wisdom 
and Spirit of the Universe," the " Soul that is the eternity of 
Thought." He realized that such experiences had greater 
magnitude and significance than they seemed to have, that they 
were part of a training of which it was not ridiculous, but 
perfectly fitting to speak in language grandiloquent and sublime. 
He realized that Nature — spiritual, alive, one — was in such 
things beginning to train, discipline, purify him. The ex- 
periences were to be understood as constituting intercourse, 
fellowship, of person with person ; fellowship in which there 
was both intelligence and passion — 

" Wisdom and Spirit of the universe ! 
Thou Soul, that art the eternity of thought ! 
That givest to forms and images a breath 
And everlasting motion ! not in vain. 
By day or star-light, thus from my first daw^n 
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
The passions that build up our human soul ; 
Not w^ith the mean and vulgar works of Man, 
But with high objects, with enduring things — 
With life and nature — purifying thus 
The elements of feeling and of thought, 
And sanctifying by such discipline 
Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." 

As time went on, the fellowship between the schoolboy and 
Nature became so frequent as to be almost habitual — 

'* Mine was it in the fields both day and night. 
And by the waters, all the summer long." 

It came through ordinary experiences, outings, amusements — 

•' Oft amid those fits of vulgar joy 
Which, through all seasons, on a child's pursuits 
Are prompt attendants, 'mid that giddy bliss 
Which, like a tempest, works along the blood 



34 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

And is forgotten ; even then I felt 
Gleams like the flashing of a shield ;-the earth 
And common face of Nature spoke to me 
Rememberable things." 



1 



skatid' nonJ^i^ ^T'^^ "''*"■ "" P"S °°'- ^ sentimentalist. He 

tiVf .t t'r^-:rtrt:ri?t z'^^^jz:^ 

things ,t gave comfort and strength now, as well as awe. 

« ■!.■ ^"'■^''^ °^ "'^ universal earth," worked "like a sea" 
with triumph and delight, with hope and fear " ' 
AH experience remained natural • ^r,i 

became suffused with a purer ellZt' trl^.r'Vf TV' 
Ifcrhf Th^ i. ,r ^' '•'^^"^"gured by a hieher 

hght. The most normally sociable of boys, he began to fee!- 

" The self-sufficing power of Solitude " 

all th halrto e^Les: deXirrr" °'*'= ^"-ge made it 
worth had to becomTa.Sh;3:, [>',■"/„ '°.-P-- "- ^ords- 
to use language which sugges'ts'^Sea « ^VlZr thich 
was growing up contemporaneously in Germany. Iftt was h^ d 

Prtr;:r|Tt:-rr^^^^^^^^^^ 

somet°h^Vte t^fo wt^"!!^::! ^'T '"'''' IT 
objective, internal as well a? exterlT ^h t:":ar:hrso:! 
m us has a counterpart in Nature. Or we may put f otherwise 
and say that Nature is a display of spirit, to whlh ou rndivWuai 
sp nts contribute something. The result of all this acTon or 
intercourse, or whatever it may be called, is a pleasurable o 

eZn'ilTr it"" °' ~--P-dence o'r fitness tremtua 
recognition, as it were, of parts in a whole. This delightful 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 35 

or awe-inspiring sense of fitness between the mind and the 
" external " world — a correspondence testifying to the unity of 
Nature — is a cardinal part of Wordsworth's poetic philosophy. 
He felt, when he was ten years old, what, in retrospect, he could 
describe as — 

" Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense 
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own 
An intellectual charm ; that calm delight 
Which, if I err not, surely must belong 
To those first-born affinities that fit 
Our new existence to existing things. 
And, in our dawn of being, constitute 
The bond of union between life and joy." 

Already, as a mere happy and ordinary schoolboy, he was 
dimly recognizing himself as bound by a kind of marriage tie to 
the world of men and things, and beginning to find warrant for 
his greatest verse to come. 

" For the discerning intellect of Man, 
When wedded to this goodly universe 
In love and holy passion," 

is to be able to regain the lost Paradise. 

" I, long before the blissful hour arrives, 
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse 
Of this great consummation : — And, by words 
Which speak of nothing more than what we are, 
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims 
How exquisitely the individual Mind 



to the External World 
Is fitted :— and how exquisitely, too — 
Theme this but little heard of among men — 
The external world is fitted to the Mind : 
And the creation (by no lower name 
Can it be called) which they with blended might 
Accomplish : — this is our high argument." 

In all this mere feeling was continually passing into intelli- 
gence, and every kind of knowledge became a source of poetry. 
Society was to him " as sweet as solitude " by — 



36 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" Gentle agitations of the mind 
From manifold distinctions, difference 
Perceived in things, where, to the unwatchful eye, 
No difference is." 

If this language has the unintelligible quality which inevit- 
ably belongs to mysticism, it has also an intense reality ; it 
expresses the kind of life-long conviction which makes religions 
and supports martyrs. Wordsworth himself recognized these 
boyish experiences as religious ; he used about them words 
specially belonging to the vocabulary of religion ; he spoke of 
"holy" calm, of communion, of faith. Nor was his sense of 
the "creative " function of his own " imagination," his conviction 
that some of what he worshipped in Nature came from within 
himself, less definite than it was bold. 

" An auxiliar light 
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
Bestowed new splendour ; the melodious birds, 
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on 
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
A like dominion, and the midnight storm 
Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence. 
And hence my transport." 

The influence of Hawkshead and the vale of Esthwaite did 
not stop with Wordsworth's school days. He came back in 
summer vacations during his Cambridge time. He saw again — 

" The snow-white church * upon the hill 
Sit like a throndd Lady." 

He went to see the dear old dame with whom he had lodged in 
the little town ; the terrier was still there to join him in his 
walks. Human sympathies which he had not felt before were 
now astir within him ; not only the lake and the hills, the sky, 
the fields, and the groves, but the peasant folk now drew forth 
his love. He began to embrace humanity in his conception of 
Nature. His outlook became more altruistic ; a "joy in widest 
commonalty spread," rather than an individual luxury. Yet it 
by no means lost its vague mystical grandeur, its unspeakable 
incommunicable privacy. 

• It was then a whitewashed building. 



CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 37 

" When first I made 
Once more the circuit of our little lake, 
If ever happiness hath lodged with man, 
That day consummate happiness was mine, 
Wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative. 
The sun was set, or setting, when I left 
Our cottage door, and evening soon brought on 
A sober hour, not winning or serene. 
For cold and raw the air was, and untuned ; 
But as a face we love is sweetest then 
When sorrow damps it, or, whatever look 
It chance to wear, is sweetest if the heart 
Have fulness in herself ; even so with me 
It fared that evening. Gently did my soul 
Put off her veil, and self-transmuted stood 
Naked, as in the presence of her God." 

One little scene marks a kind of climax of this phase of the 
poet's experience. During these vacation days the young man 
was far from being wholly satisfied with himself; what he looked 
back upon as frivolity and triviality mixed with the high delights 
of a poetic soul. Ordinary social pleasures — dancing, games, 
andfthe rest of it — came to "depress zeal" and "damp yearn- 
ings." He felt himself growing weaker instead of stronger ; his 
very garments seemed to prey on his strength. Nor did social 
amusements make him unselfish ; on the contrary, they — 

" Stopped the quiet stream 
Of self-forgetfulness." 

Yet out of one time which the poet's austerity might have 
condemned as specially wasteful in its frivolity, came an act of 
decisive dedication to the unseen and eternal. Somewhere (not 
far from Hawkshead, and not far from a view-point over the 
sea) the young Wordsworth had been at a late and long dance. 

" 'Mid a throng 
Of maids and youths, old men, and matrons staid 
A medley of all tempers, I had passed 
The night in dancing, gaiety, and mirth, 
With din of instruments and shuffling feet, 
And glancing forms, and tapers glittering. 
And unaimed prattle flying up and down ; 
Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there 
Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed, 
Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head, 
And tingled through the veins." 



38 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Then came the end of the ball, and the untimely passing out 
into the quiet of the early morning. It was after cockcrow ; the 
east was alive. As the youth walked home the sun rose ; the 
sea laughed in the distance ; the mountains were as " bright as 
the clouds." A more ordinary mind than Wordsworth's would 
have halted on the commonplace contrast between the scenes 
inside and outside the ballroom, between the tired spirit of the 
night sinking back among extinguished lights and exhausted 
fripperies, and the glorious young day, leaping up like a giant 
refreshed with wine. A more conventional moralist would have 
vexed himself that the night had hindered him from the best 
enjoyment of the day. It was otherwise with Wordsworth. To 
the high mood of that morning the night contributed as much 
as the day. There was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to 
regret. The night and the morning made up one great expe- 
rience, one moment of destiny. It was the accolade of the 
knightly poet. 

" To the brim 
My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly 
A dedicated Spirit." 

So much had come of the schooltime among the mountains 
and the lakes. And it was their work. They had made their 
poet. 



CHAPTER III 
THE WEST COUNTRY 

AMONG the pleasant English shires none is pleasanter, 
none richer, than Somerset. Nor is there any more 
various or more fertile in surprises. Hill, plain, and sea " bear 
each an orchestral part " in the general character and effect. 
In the north-west the county is flat plain, bounded by the 
Bristol Channel. Beyond wide expanses, relieved from dulness 
by cheerful apple-orchards, you guess rather than see the 
gleaming streaks of sand and silver ; you may be aware of 
a hazy sail on the horizon ; if the air is clear, you will see, from 
miles inland, the irregular outlines of Steepholm and Flatholm, 
the rocky islets that stand at the outlet of Severn Sea ; and at 
night, as you look from any high ground, the sky will be 
reddened by the glare of the furnaces of South Wales. 

Bridgwater, with its long streets, its fine church and its 
busy markets, stands on the little river Parret, which sinks 
sluggishly north-westward from the Jurassic uplands near 
Yeovil and the Dorset border. Its course is through marshy 
alluvium ; and a poor muddy concern it looks at Bridgwater, 
though the tide is plainly felt there, and good-sized vessels 
are in the ooze on either side of the bridge, waiting for high 
water. But, on the whole, the town is beyond the flats 
through which the traveller's course from Bristol has lain, 
beyond the cornfields and orchards of the present, the pathless 
wastes of Alfred's and even of Monmouth's days. West of it 
the ground rises into pleasant fertile upland of New Red 
Sandstone, to merge, a few miles further on, in the much 
older Devonian strata, which stretch, with only one small 
interruption, across Exmoor to the Atlantic shore. 

The high ground in which the Parret rises forms the 

39 



40 AVORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

boundary between Somerset and Dorset, and, to the westward, 
makes a background for the scenery of eastern Devon. The 
whole region, dividing the Bristol from the English Channel, 
is the heart of the "west country," a land of cider and the 
letter ** z " ; soft and moist in climate ; abounding in orchards ; 
its peasantry without the shrewdness of the north, but rich in 
qualities of the heart, due, perhaps, to the Celtic strain ; gracious, 
neighbourly, civil folk, with a kindly greeting for the stranger, 
but with a deep local patriotism. Remote and primitive the 
west country remains, even in these days ; perhaps, in a sense, 
even more so, in spite of railways, than it was when Words- 
worth and Coleridge made it a land of the Muses. 

For, as a glance at the map shows, it is the natural play- 
ground and rural outlet and refuge of Bristol ; and Bristol, a 
century since, was relatively a more important place than it 
is now. It was still the second city in the kingdom, the 
counterpart in the west of London in the east ; for in those 
days the industrial importance of the north had hardly arisen : 
the greatness of Manchester, the greatness of Liverpool, lay in 
the future, though a future close at hand. Moreover, was 
not Bath close to Bristol — Bath with its pump-room and its 
waters, the chief cynosure of eighteenth-century fashionable 
idleness and mild invalidism ? And had not Bristol its own 
" hot-wells," whereof we read in Humphrey Clinker and Evelina^ 
to which humbler people resorted ? 

Among the personalities who adorn the annals of the great 
Atlantic port in the eighteenth century, a few stand out 
conspicuous. One was Edward Colston (whom the annual 
" Colston banquets " commemorate to this day), the philan- 
thropic West India merchant who represented the city in 
Parliament in the last days of Queen Anne's reign and did so 
much for Bristol's highest good. A more famous representative 
was Edmund Burke, who, though an outsider, was elected for 
Bristol in 1774, and sat for the city until 1780. It was as 
member for Bristol that Burke made his great speeches on the 
American question ; and it was to the Sheriffs of Bristol that he 
wrote, in I777» ^ letter almost as great, in which he laid claim 
to the full sympathy of the citizens, and paid them a compli- 
ment of which they might well be proud. " By the favour of 
my fellow-citizens," he wrote, " I am the representative of an 



THE WEST COUNTRY 41 

honest, well-ordered, virtuous city ; of a people who preserve 
more of the original English simplicity and purity of manners 
than perhaps any other. You possess among you several men 
and magistrates of large and cultivated understandings ; fit 
for any employment in any sphere," Yet this eminent 
constituency was on the eve of quarrelling with Burke, and, a 
little later, spurning him altogether. In 1778, the selfishness of 
the Bristol merchants made them oppose Burke's noble efforts 
for the liberation of Irish industry ; the city was in a state of 
such '* miserable distraction," that Burke, knowing that defeat 
was certain, refused to submit himself to its suffrages, and 
humbly and respectfully, and for ever, took his leave of the 
sheriffs, the candidates, and the electors. This time it was the 
Protestantism of Bristol which resented Burke's support of 
the mitigation of Roman Catholic disabilities. 

Burke's chief friend and correspondent in his Bristol 
constituency was Richard Champion, the inventor of the famous 
" Bristol China." Hannah More, the " improver " of so many 
occasions, and a larger figure, perhaps, in English life than we 
realize, lived and worked close to Bristol. 

To the lover of literature, however, more interesting than 
any of those names are certain comparatively obscure in- 
habitants, whose fortunes were linked with the fortunes of 
English poetry at a great crisis of its history. There was, for 
instance, Joseph Cottle the bookseller and publisher, whose enter- 
prise and literary sympathy helped the genius of Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and Southey forth into the outer air. Of him we 
shall hear again. Not so eminent as Cottle was another Bristol 
man named Robert Southey, a countryman of West Somerset 
by birth, who became a linen-draper in the great town, with a 
hare for his shop sign, and the father of a younger Robert 
Southey, destined to fame. 

Neither Southey the elder nor his wife was interesting ; but 
the young Robert had an ambitious aunt who insisted on the 
boy's being sent to school at Westminster, and after that to 
Balliol College, Oxford. Even at school Southey had been 
drinking at the sources of Romanticism, and his head was full 
of Rousseau when he went up to Balliol in 1792. His sympathies 
were as revolutionary as Wordsworth's, and Gibbon had taught 
him to be a sceptic in religion. Instead of " minding his books," 



42 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

as the authorities expected him to do, he planned epic poems ; 
and meditated, with kindred enthusiasts, emigration to virgin 
soil in America, and the plantation of a republican settlement 
there, where perfect social equality might be realized without 
the lurid horrors that were spoiling the French Revolution. 
One day in the summer term of 1794, there appeared in Oxford 
and in Southey's rooms a young man from Southey's west 
country though not from Bristol. He was a strange-looking 
youth, with masses of long black hair parted Miltonically in the 
middle, and so emphasizing the expanse of a noble brow ; open, 
luminous grey eyes ; and a curiously large mouth, which, with 
its parted lips, looked weak in repose, but which, when it 
became the agent of the intelligence bespoken by brow and 
eye, uttered speech even then unparalleled in its radiant fulness. 
It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, younger son of the quaint 
pedantic vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, who was still an 
undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, but had run away 
and enlisted in the King's Dragoons, from which escapade he 
had been some months returned. Coleridge had a companion 
with him with whom he was on his way to begin a walking-tour 
in Wales ; and they had an introduction' to Southey. A young 
man who would run away from Cambridge to enlist ; a young 
man of rare originality, full of enthusiasm, and copious of 
speech, was the sort likely to fall in with Southey's American 
dream, and so it proved. They left Oxford together ; and, when 
Coleridge's Welsh tour was over, he came to Bristol, and he and 
Southey walked about Somersetshire, and talked their scheme 
of Rousseauish Transatlantic equality — " Pantisocracy," the 
rule of all and sundry, was to be its name — into definite shape. 
The shape was very definite indeed. Twelve gentlemen sym- 
metrically matched with twelve ladies were to embark for 
America in the following spring. They were to plant them- 
selves on a delightful spot in the " back settlements " ; each 
gentleman was to provide ;^I25, to work two or three hours a 
day, to hold any political or religious opinions he liked, and to 
be free to quit the Commonwealth at any time. The produce 
of the labour was to be held communistically, and there were 
to be plenty of books for the improvement of the ample leisure. 
The twelve ladies were a little difficult to dispose of. The 
arrangements contemplated were not " Platonic," in the popular 



THE WEST COUNTRY 43 

sense of that word ; for the education of children was carefully 
provided for. Apparently it was left undecided whether and 
how matrimonial plans were to be made on a communistic 
basis. Such ideas grew out of the west country in those days. 

A practical step towards the realization of Pantisocracy was 
the engagement of Southey and Coleridge respectively to two 
sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker, daughters of a Bristol mer- 
chant. There was a third daughter, Mary Fricker ; and she 
was paired ofif with a third Pantisocrat, Robert Lovell, the son 
of another Bristol tradesman, a Quaker, who joined Southey in 
his first volume of verse, and died a year or two after. The 
community were to start in April, 1795 ; that had been settled 
during autumn walks in pleasant Somerset and conferences at 
Southey's aunt's house at Bristol ; but when April came, nobody 
was ready to start. Coleridge had gone to Cambridge to take 
his degree, and then to London to write sonnets in the Morning 
Chronicle. During this time he seemed to forget all about 
Pantisocracy and Sarah Fricker. In January, Southey dug 
him out of London and carried him back to Bristol, where his 
interest in both revived. Southey and he lived together, and 
with them was another young Pantisocrat, Robert Burnett, son 
of a Somerset farmer. Cottle, the bookseller, was very amiable 
and helpful, and there were all sorts of literary and other plans. 
But the minimum £12$ necessary from each gentleman of the 
twelve — and where were the twelve ? — was not forthcoming ; 
and so, when April arrived, no start was made ; and, as the 
year 1795 grew older, it became evident that no start ever 
would be made. At close quarters, Southey found Coleridge's 
wonderful talk a trifle fatiguing ; the Pantisocrats had difficulty 
in paying even for their Bristol lodgings ; and at last Southey 
went off to Bath disillusioned as to Pantisocracy, and resolved 
to follow conventional courses. Poor Coleridge was left lament- 
ing and grumbling at Bristol. Matrimony was the only solid 
result of the Pantisocratic negotiations. Before the year was 
out, Sarah Fricker had become Mrs. Coleridge, and Edith 
Fricker Mrs. Southey, in St. Mary Redclifife's Church. 

While Coleridge and Southey were "digging," as modern 
Oxonians say, together in those summer days at Bristol, what 
was Wordsworth doing? Wordsworth knew nothing of Cole- 
ridge or of Southey ; but he too — so Destiny would have it 



44 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

— was coming to Bristol and the West country. He had gone 
straight from Hawkshead to Ca.m\)ndge in 1787, where he 
passed through the usual course at St. John's College. The 
University did little that was definitely formative for Words- 
worth ; it sheltered his growth and supplied his meditative 
imagination with some themes ; but neither its prescribed 
studies nor its friendships counted for much in his life. He 
learned more in vacation rambles ; immeasurably more in 
London, and on his second and fateful visit to France in 
1791-2. For Wordsworth the years between 1792 and 1796 
were very critical. He had been away from Cambridge more 
than four years ; he had had his stimulating and disturbing 
time in France ; he was face to face with the imperious neces- 
sities of bread and butter. He intended, indeed, to be a poet ; 
but the amount of bread and butter which can be made out of 
poetry such as An Evening Walk or Descriptive Sketches cannot 
be very satisfying in any conceivable condition of appetite, 
either for poetry or for bread and butter. It would have been 
natural to take Orders, as his brother Christopher afterwards 
did ; but he did not hear the call, without which he was too 
conscientious to dare to take such a step. In fact, in those 
days, though far from the Unitarianism of Coleridge, the 
Deism, or whatever it may have been, of Southey, though he 
could never, probably, have been turned into a Pantisocrat, 
Wordsworth was much of a rebel ; he was ashamed of his 
country, or at least of the Government of it ; he felt as if his 
spiritual beliefs were built on the sand. For a time he 
steadied himself on what the Revolutionists called " Reason," 
conceived as intelligence acting without disturbance by feeling. 
Pleasing himself with no childish Utopias such as filled the 
dreams of Southey and Coleridge, he tried to construct abstract 
social ideals. He began \iY anatomizing the frame of social life^ 
to use his own phrase ; he questioned and cross-questioned 
everything, expecting that everything would prove itself; and 
finding that nothing would, he — 

"Yielded up moral questions in despair." 
A man in this frame of mind is not fit to take Orders ; nor 
is he very fit to succeed in anything, unless, indeed, he can 
identify himself wholly with activities that are entirely practi- 
cal ; and Wordsworth wanted to be a poet ! 



THE WEST COUNTRY 45 

He took refuge in walking-tours and looked out for tutor- 
ships. In one of the walking-tours, in 1793, he visited the 
Wye ; and, if we may trust his account of his mood written 
five years later, he was still quick with the passionate feeling for 
Nature which had marked his boyhood. He sang in 1798 — 

" I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock. 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite." 

In the course of this same expedition he went up the Wye 
to Goodrich, where, in the courtyard of the castle, he met the 
"little cottage-girl," whose " beauty made him glad," with whom 
he chatted, and about whom, in the annus mirahilis, 1798, he 
was to have the lovely afterthought which we know as We m^e 
Seven. 1794 was the same loose, desultory kind of year, made 
up of walking-tours, a little teaching, some poetizing and much 
meditating, while the future was as uncertain as ever. The 
deepest cause of the unrest and purposelessness, we may be 
sure, was the "despair" in which he had "yielded up moral 
questions." While relations and friends saw only want of 
. openings and slackness of energy, while his sister Dorothy was 
' concerned only about William's want of employment, William 
'was wholly preoccupied with the evolution of the French 
' drama ; he could not dissociate from it that English individuality 
' of his which called out for a career, or at least an income. 

Part of the scepticism which was numbing him came, not 

' from any infection of French atheism, but from loss of faith in 

-Hhe revolutionary movement. The first jar had been given to 

' his nature by the hostility of England to France : soon he was 

jarred again by the insolent aggressiveness of the French arms. 

' He had rapid fluctuations of feeling. One summer day, in 

1794, he was walking across the sands which, at low water, 

make firm footing beyond the mouth of the Leven, between 

1 Ulverston and Grange. The sands and shallow waters of the 

i estuary were alive with pleasure-seekers, with guides to keep 

- them from treacherous places ; overhead was the plenitude of 

summer Hsrht in serenest weather. Wordsworth was near the 



46 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

scenes of his childhood, and the luxury of pensive reminiscence 
came on him. In the morning he had stood by the grave of 
his Hawkshead schoolmaster, William Taylor, in Cartmell 
churchyard ; and he reflected with how much pleasure Taylor 
would have greeted his old pupil as a poet. Suddenly, and by 
a strange hap, the vast issues of the great world broke in on 
the sweet egoistic trance. The pedestrian was close to the 
pleasure-seekers when he heard one of them say, Robespierre is 
dead ! At the shock of this news Wordsworth's faith in Provi- 
dence felt strong once more ; and as he walked along he hailed, 
in not very good blank verse, the coming of " golden times," in 
which the Revolution, purged of the Terror, would — 

" March firmly towards righteousness and peace." 

And so " interrupted by uneasy bursts of exultation," he went 
on his way. 

During the months in which Southey and Coleridge were 
planning their Pantisocracy in the west country, Wordsworth 
was much among the Lakes. It was good for him to be there ; 
for nothing, save one other thing, was so restorative to his soul 
as the northern Paradise. And now that other thing also was 
his ; for now he had the frequent, almost constant, companion- 
ship of Dorothy. Since the break-up of the Cockermouth 
home, she had lived, partly with her cousins, the Rawsons, near 
Halifax, and much with her mother's brother Canon Cookson 
at Windsor, and at his living of Forncett in Norfolk. The 
dream of her life was to live with William. When he was 
restored to her, after Cambridge and France, she delighted in 
him as much as she had done when they were children. At the 
Christmas of 1792 they were together at Forncett, and tastec 
the joy of a perfect companionship of the kind which only 
brothers and sisters may know. " I cannot describe," she wrote, 
" his attention to me. There was no pleasure that he would notr 
have given up with joy for half an hour's conversation with me. 
Every day, as soon as we rose from dinner, we used to pace the 
gravel walk in the garden till six o'clock. Nothing but rain or 
snow prevented our taking this walk. Often have I gone out, 
when the keenest north wind has been whistling amongst the 
trees over our head, and have paced that walk in the garden, 
which will always be dear to me — from the remembrance ob 



THE WEST COUNTRY 47 

those very long conversations I have had upon it supported by 
my brother's arm. Ah ! I never thought of the cold when he 
was with me. I am as heretical as yourself in my opinions 
concerning love and friendship. I am very sure that love will 
never bind me closer to any human being than friendship binds 
me ... to William, my earliest and my dearest male friend." 

During the next two years she was much his companion, 
often in long walking-tours. In the spring of 1794 — some 
months before William heard of Robespierre's death on Ulver- 
ston sands — they made a great tour in the Lake-country, taking 
walks of portentous length for a girl, reviving childish impres- 
sions, and adding to them. They paused near Keswick to pay 
a visit to the Calverts at Windybrow, a farmhouse close to the 
town. The Calverts were cultivated, simple people, fond of 
reading, and loving their cottage better than any of the "showy 
edifices " in the neighbourhood. The head of the family was 
land-agent to the Duke of Norfolk. The Wordsworths were 
" paying guests," and had their own sitting-room. With one of 
the brothers, William Calvert, Wordsworth had been in the Isle 
of Wight when the guns boomed hostility to France across Spit- 
head ; and there was another, Raisley, who seemed to be 
falling into consumption, and whose condition gave Wordsworth 
great anxiety at this time. Those spring days were very 
happy ; besides the Calverts at Windybrow, there were the 
Speddings at Armathwaite, who were to give an eminent son to 
literature in the coming century. There were wonderful views 
from the windows ; and the Wordsworths cultivated happiness 
on an Irish diet of milk and potatoes. 

Even milk and potatoes cost something, and one cannot 

live upon views. Wordsworth was thinking of what we now 

call journalism as a possible means of livelihood. Twelve years 

after the death of Samuel Johnson, journalism was very far 

from being what it is now ; but the great man had fairly launched 

it, and a great and permanent career lay before it. Journalism, 

the art of the periodical, when it is not mere gossip, means two 

f things in chief, literary criticism and pohtical comment, and, in 

the last decade of the eighteenth century, it was a very spring- 

, tide for both in Britain. For were these not the days of the 

■ Romantic Revival, the Renascence of Wonder, in literature; 

^.1 and did not the air, from end to end of the island, hum and 



48 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



e of" 



buzz with revolutionary ideas, social theories, and the noise 
Pitt-and-Fox-ite controversy ? The number of periodicals was 
still small, and none was perhaps very influential. The natural 
course for a clever and energetic young man still was to do what 
Steele and Johnson had done, and start a new one if he had 
enough money and good auspices ; and, with or without 
co-adjutors, to make it the vehicle of his thought. Among 
Wordsworth's Cambridge friends was a certain James Mathews 
who was pushing his fortune in literary London ; and the two 
thought that they might together start a monthly " miscellany." 
It was to be called The Philanthropist, and to be " republican " 
without being "revolutionary." Wordsworth, in the true 
eighteenth-century style, was to "communicate critical remarks 
on poetry, the arts of painting, gardening, etc., besides essays on 
morals and politics." But neither Wordsworth nor Mathews 
was a Steele or an Addison ; and The Philanthropist never 
got beyond the projectors' brains. Should Wordsworth go up 
to town and try to get work on some daily newspaper ? An 
Opposition paper it must, of course be ; Wordsworth's French 
sympathies might be shaken, but he was as averse as ever from 
Pitt's war against France. He consulted Mathews about this ; 
but there is no evidence that Mathews encouraged. Meanwhile 
something happened. 

Through the winter of 1794-5 William and Dorothy Words- 
worth were mostly in the Lake country and much at Windybrow. 
In those months Raisley Calvert was dying, and Wordsworth 
spent much of his time by his bedside. Early in 1795 he 
died ; and it was found that he had left ;^900 to Wordsworth. 
It was not much ; but it seemed enough to be a poet upon, and 
it was enough to make Wordsworth give up thoughts of journal- 
ism for ever. Eleven years later he wrote a sonnet about 
this crisis in his life, which reveals to us the very essence of 
the man. 

" Calvert ! it must not be unheard by them 
Who may respect my name, that I to thee 
Owed many years of early liberty. 
This care was thine when sickness did condemn 
Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem — 
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray 
Where'er I liked); and finally array 
My temples with the Muse's diadem. 



THE WEST COUNTRY 49 

Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth ; 
If there be aught of pure, or good, or great, 
In my past verse ; or shall be, in the lays 
Of higher mood, which now I meditate ; — 
It gladdens me, O worthy, short-lived Youth ! 
To think how much of this will be thy praise." 

To be "frugal and severe," and "finally" to win "the 
Muse's diadem": such was Wordsworth's life, and such its 
reward. 

Now at last, then, Dorothy's dream could come true, and she 
and William could begin their joint-life in a more complete 
home than farmhouse lodgings could supply. But where, in 
the length and breadth of England ? 

Basil Montagu, who was to become eminent at the Bar and 
as editor of Bacon, was just Wordsworth's age, and had been at 
Cambridge with him. He was now in chambers in London, a 
married man, though not yet called to the Bar. Montagu had 
a friend at Bristol, a merchant named Finney, and Pinney had a 
country-house in Dorset called Racedown Lodge, among the 
big hills between Crewkerne and Lyme Regis. In the summer 
of 1795 Wordsworth, looking out for something to help the 
interest of Raisley Calvert's legacy, consulted Basil Montagu, 
probably face to face in London. Pinney, of Bristol and Race- 
down, had a boy of thirteen ; and, on Montagu's advice and 
with his introduction, Wordsworth went to Bristol to stay with 
Pinney, possibly as tutor to the boy, certainly to discuss plans 
with the merchant. The result was the construction of a 
delightful scheme for the Wordsworths. Pinney was to let 
them have Racedown Lodge rent-free, on condition that the 
eldest son of the family should have right of entry and resi- 
dence for a few weeks each year. Basil Montagu had a son 
also called Basil, whom he was to board with the Wordsworths 
at Racedown ; and there was to be a little girl besides, of three 
and a half (a relation of the Wordsworths'), whom Dorothy was 
to look after. Such was the projected settlement of 1795 which 
grew out of Raisley Calvert's bequest and Basil Montagu's 
friendship. 

Early in September Dorothy wrote all about it to a friend, 
and told gleefully how they were to live on £^0 or £Zq 
from all sources, and how she was to join William at Bristol, 

£ 



50 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

and drive with him fifty miles in a chaise to Racedown. To 
Racedown, accordingly, the brother and sister went, and there 
they remained for the better part of two years, till July, 1797. 
They were settling in there, when Coleridge — Pantisocracy 
having come to grief — was married at St. Mary Redcliffe's, and 
spending his honeymoon in a tiny cottage at Clevedon ; and 
they had been settled some time when Southey, also newly 
married, set out, without his wife, to spend the winter in 
Portuguese sunshine and among the lemon groves and cork- 
trees of Cintra. 

Two wonderful years at Racedown ! — not so much because 
of the poetry Wordsworth wrote there, though that was not 
without significance, as because of the history of his soul. For 
we cannot, surely, be wrong in attributing to those years the 
chief part of that process of recovery of which Wordsworth has 
told us so much, that recovery from the shocks of revolution, 
that restoration of admiration, faith, and love, chastened by the 
knowledge of man at his worst, which is the key to his character 
and his work. And we certainly need be in no doubt as to the 
chief agency by which the recovery was brought about. 

The companionship of the brother and sister, enjoyed inter- 
mittently during long walks in the Lake country and pleasant 
days in the Calverts' house at Windybrow, was now continuous. 
For the first time in her life Dorothy felt at home; her eager, 
passionate love of Nature was fed by the beautiful upland 
scenery of Dorset and the Devon border, the bold heights, golden 
with broom and furze, and swept by sea-winds ; and she had 
William always with her. They lived a life of perfect simplicity, 
reading and writing indoors, walking and gardening without. 
Their means were straiter than they had expected, for, some- 
how, little Basil Montagu was their only resident charge. But 
he was a great delight to them. They left him to Nature's 
leading, with a little gentle human discipline superadded. In 
the first winter, a certain Mary Hutchinson, with whom William 
had played at Penrith, paid them a visit. Perhaps this was the 
" nearer view " of his old playmate, of which he was to sing — 

*' I saw her upon nearer view, 
A Spirit, yet a Woman too! 
Her household motions light and free, 
And steps of virgin-liberty ; 



THE WEST COUNTRY 51 

A countenance in which did meet 

Sweet records, promises as sweet ; 

A Creature not too bright or good 

For human nature's daily food ; 

For transient sorrows, simple wiles, 

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles." 

Anyhow, Dorothy wrote that they were " as happy as human 
beings can be, that is, when William is at home ; for you cannot 
imagine how dull we feel when he is away. . . . He is the life 
of the whole house." These pleasant things make the outside 
picture. But it is the inner life at Racedown of which they are 
the index, which chiefly interests us. Wordsworth himself has 
admitted us into the inner shrine in that autobiography, so 
veracious and yet so imaginative, so modest and yet so lofty in 
its modesty, which we know as The Prelude. The last four 
books of The Prelude tell us how the disillusioned Revolutionist 
was brought to that culmination of his genius — that region of 
central calm from which his greatest influence came. He tells 
us how, when he could bear the torment of moral problems no 
longer, he found a momentary refuge in mathematics, in science 
so abstract as to appeal to the reasoning faculties alone. Then 
it was that his sister saved him by showing him his true self, by 
assuring him that his true self was clouded, but not injured. She 
reminded him of the high prerogative of a poet, who controls 
and transfigures circumstance, and is not mastered by it. 

" She whispered still that brightness would return, 
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 
A Poet." 

Nor did Dorothy help her brother only by a ministry which 
might harden as well as strengthen his self-reliance. She 
softened and sweetened him as only a woman's influence can 
soften and sweeten a man. 

" But for thee, dear Friend ! 
My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had stood 
In her original self too confident, 
Retained too long a countenance severe ; 
A rock with torrents roaring, with the clouds 
Familiar, and a favourite of the stars : 
But thou didst plant its crevices with flowers, 
Hang it with shrubs that twinkle in the breeze. 
And teach the httle birds to build their nests 
And warble in its chambers." 



52 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Yet, in Wordsworth's case, no human affection, no human 
being could be more than an " under-agent " in such great 
operations. Dorothy could take her brother to Nature, could 
show him Nature ; but it was Nature alone who could do the 
whole work. Nature was only " assisted " by " all varieties of 
human love." It was Nature only, the "Being that is in the 
clouds and air," the Presence that disitirbs with the joy of 
elevated thoughts, that could heal, in a nature like Wordsworth's, 
the wounds that Man had made. And it was only after he had 
been healed that he could understand or love Man again. 

It is not easy, otherwise than by quotation, to set forth the 
communion which Wordsworth claimed with Nature. Yet in 
the books of The Prehide referred to above and again and 
again, if more briefly, elsewhere, he expresses himself on the 
subject with great fulness. Perhaps the central passage of all 
is that marvellous conclusion of the fourth book of The 
Excursion — " Despondency Corrected," in which the Wanderer, 
who stands for Wordsworth healed and restored, exhorts the 
Solitary, who may be taken to represent Wordsworth jarred 
and wounded. The passage is the more relevant that part of 
it was written in the west country, while Wordsworth was 
living with his sister there. It is easy to quote : may one 
venture to paraphrase ? 

Men, Wordsworth seems to mean, were intended to possess a 
peace which passes all understanding, and of which they ought 
not to be deprived. They can possess it by virtue of a faculty of 
imagination ; which, whatever it means besides and elsewhere in 
Wordsworth, here means a combination of the reason and the 
affections, by which men lay hold of the central fact of the 
universe, which is Love, Truth, and Beauty. In doing this, 
they are undaunted by the evil and adversity which are so 
prominent ; or, rather, imagination (which may also be called 
faith) sees these hindrances in a light which deprives them of 
their terrors. This use of the imagination is more than half 
moral (Wordsworth uses the striking phrase " imaginative Will "), 
and it may be described as "Admiration, Hope, and Love." 
The climax of its achievement is to find Love as the active and 
dominant principle of things ; and to recognize through Love 
the kinship of man with man. 

And now, what part is played by Nature, in the sense of the 



THE WEST COUNTRY 5S 

various phenomena of the open air, in this wholesome exercise 
of human faculty ? How are men helped to such transcendent 
metaphysical results bydayspring, moonshine, and the solemnities 
of starlight ; by smiling flower and waving tree, by the voices of 
lambs in the meadow, or the wheel of the eagle about some 
lonely peak ? Wordsworth answers that all these things teach 
the mind through the affections ; that they touch the affections 
easily and naturally because they exclude the jarring human 
problems ; and that the gentler and quieter they are, the more 
likely they are to do so. When the charm of Nature has been 
shed abroad in a man, then he is prepared to face even the 
hardest human problems with the serenity of love. In Words- 
worth's own words, written probably at Racedown — 

" For the Man who . . . communes with the Forms 
Of nature, who with understanding heart 
Both knows and loves such objects as excite 
No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
No vengeance and no hatred — needs must feel 
The joy of that pure principle of love 
So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught 
Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
But seek for objects of a kindred love 
In fellow-natures and a kindred joy. 
Accordingly he by degrees perceives 
His feelings of aversion softened down ; 
A holy tenderness pervade his frame, 
His sanity of reason not impaired, 
Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear, 
From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round 
And seeks for good ; and finds the good he seeks ; 
Until abhorrence and contempt are things 
He only knows by name ; and, if he hear 
From other mouths, the language which they speak. 
He is compassionate, and has no thought, 
No feeling, which can overcome his love." 

Nor is this all : Nature is not only a refuge and a teacher ; 
she is a symbolic system ; and from her phenomena, her laws, 
we may and ought to learn the laws of human obligation. " So 
build we up," he concludes — 

*' The Being that we are ; 
Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things, 
We shall be wise perforce. . . . Whate'er we see 



54 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Or feel, shall tend to quicken and refine ; 
Shall fix, in calmer seats of moral strength 
Earthly desires ; and raise, to loftier heights 
Of divine love, our intellectual soul." 

The time at Racedown was not very productive. Words- 
worth was learning rather than teaching ; he was gaining his 
life's poise, and his poetic efforts were tentative. He tried his 
hand at translating Juvenal ; he worked hard at that most 
undramatic of dramas, The Borderers^ which hardly the most 
enthusiastic Wordsworthian now reads, but which the greatest 
critic of his age spoke of as " absolutely wonderful," and which, 
he seemed to imply, put Wordsworth above Shakespeare in 
knowledge of the heart. One essay, however, he made of lasting 
importance. As he walked about Dorset he heard the story of 
desertion, the story of the ruined cottage and Margaret, which 
forms the second half of the first book of The Excursion ; and 
all that story he wrote there, with one or two other passages 
afterwards to form part of the same long poem. 

In 1796 the three remarkable inhabitants of the west 
country, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, were to meet, 
with consequences momentous to English literature. Coleridge, 
in the first year of his married life, was fussily busy and 
ambulatory, but essentially unhappy and desultory. His head- 
quarters were at Redcliffe Hill, close to Bristol. He was 
writing and publishing poetry ; but his chief occupation was 
trying to start a periodical somewhat on the lines of Words- 
worth's abortive Phila7tthropist. It was to be called The 
Watchman. Coleridge wandered over England in the early 
months of 1796 in search of subscribers, preaching in Unitarian 
chapels on the Sundays. Of course TJie Watchman soon dropped 
into Umbo ; and so did scheme after scheme of this unhappy 
young man. His wife kept going such home as he had at 
Bristol ; and there, this same year, his eldest son, David Hartley, 
was born. 

Southey returned from Portugal to Bristol and his wife in 
May of this year, intending to leave his Edith no more, and to 
prepare for the dogged pursuit of law in the winter. His 
relations with Coleridge were still rather strained, though there 
was no open quarrel ; and they were often together. Somehow, 
Wordsworth got to know of the "two extraordinary youths," as 



THE WEST COUNTRY 55 

he called them, and went to see them at Bristol. There is no 
evidence that the acquaintance with Southey went much further 
at this stage ; but the Wordsworths took greatly to ColeridgCj 
and there were several interchanges of visits between Racedown 
and Bristol. The Wordsworths never forgot the way in which 
Coleridge at Racedown leapt a fence and came across a field 
instead of walking on the highroad. Dorothy was immensely 
interested in the new friend, in his talk, and his good temper. 
She thought him plain : he was tall and thin, and it was hard 
to get over the wide mouth with its indifferent teeth ; but when 
the gray eyes lighted up ! — it was indeed a *' fine frenzy " that 
one saw in them. There was evidently a rushing together 
of spirits here from which great things might come. 

In 1797 the Wordsworths left breezy Racedown, and came 
into Somerset to be near the Coleridges. When you pass 
out of Bridgwater to continue the journey westward, you are 
soon among pleasant new red sandstone uplands well supplied 
with the characteristic features of English scenery, villages, 
country seats, comfortable farmsteads. In front, growing into 
greater clearness as your wheels or horses' feet bear you onwards, 
is the long line of hills which you are told are the Quantocks, 
not high, except here and there, and showing much woodland 
and many folds and creases when you are near enough to make 
them out. Some miles from Bridgwater you pause on a summit, 
for the Quantocks are near enough to be scrutinized, and 
between you and them there is a breadth of low country with a 
tall church tower, and near, but not close to it, a village of 
some size. It is Nether Stowey ; and in a few minutes more 
you are in the gently climbing street with the market-cross, and 
the runlet of water by the side of the roadway. Making still 
for the Quantocks, you pause again by the last house on the 
left-hand side of the street. For there is a tablet let into the 
wall which tells the world that Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived 
here. 

Coleridge drifted to Nether Stowey with his wife and baby 
Hartley at the Christmastide of 1796-7. What brought him 
there ? 

At Nether Stowey lived in those days a certain Thomas 
Poole, one of the west-country folk on whose modest shoulders 
Providence laid some of the weight of the literary destinies 



56 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

of England. Poole was only a tanner by trade ; but circum- 
stances and kindness of heart made him a kind of Maecenas or 
Monckton Milnes in his place and day. His people were of 
Somerset for generations ; and Tom Poole's tanning-business 
was hereditary. He took to it with much intelligence if not 
with very hearty liking, and settled down at twenty-five in the 
substantial house at Nether Stowey as assistant and successor 
to his father. He was a man of quite remarkable impression- 
ableness and amiability ; and, though he had no educational 
advantages, he soon showed himself an essentially well-educated 
man, intellectual, well informed, benevolent and just. Un- 
happily for his social peace, if fortunately for his individual 
development, his sympathies were with the early French 
Revolution ; and this liberalism greatly disturbed his excellent 
father, other relations of his, and the conservative notions of 
Somerset generally. He spent many hours daily in reading ; 
and among his favourite books there were (so it was thought) 
the works of too many French philosophers. But the French 
fever passed ; and it was not as a revolutionary, but rather as a 
most law-abiding and religious citizen,'that Tom Poole endeared 
himself at and about Nether Stowey. One influence that may 
have helped to keep him straight was that of his cousin John 
Poole, an Oxford man, a Fellow of Oriel, and a clergyman, 
whose home was near. The two men had much to do with the 
foundation of a book club at Nether Stowey ; and J. Poole 
of Oriel kept a sharp eye on any work of an " infidel " tendency 
which his " democratic " cousin might introduce. 

In 1794, when Coleridge was twenty-two, Tom Poole was 
twenty-nine, and still absorbingly interested in social and political 
questions and reforms. It was the year of Robespierre's death ; 
of Wordsworth's wanderings with his sister ; of Coleridge's 
introduction to Southey at Oxford, and their subsequent 
negotiations about Pantisocracy at Bristol and in its neigh- 
bourhood. In the autumn they, with Lovell and Burnett, were, 
as we remember, recruiting in the highways and bye-ways 
of Somerset for the Pantisocratic scheme : what more inevitable 
than that they should go to Nether Stowey, and what more 
natural than that they should call on Tom Poole ? They did 
call on him ; he was immensely interested ; and took them 
one August day, to see Cousin John, who was much shocked 



THE WEST COUNTRY 57 

by the opinions of the young strangers. '* Each of them," he 
records in his Latin diary, " was shamefully hot with Democratic 
rage as regards politics, and both were Infidel as to religion " 
(uterque vero rabie Democratica, quoad Politiam ; et Infidelis 
quoad Religionem spectat, turpiter fervet). Tom's point of 
view was different ; and though he lamented over the nature 
of at least Southey's religion, he described the scheme with 
much sympathetic detail. 

The acquaintance thus made between Coleridge and Poole 
ripened with time. Poole's intellectual tastes steadily grew, 
and were fed by wise reading in English, French, and Latin, 
and the collection of a good library. Poole had an enthusiastic 
belief in Coleridge and his probable career ; and the Poole 
house at Nether Stowey, with the tanyard behind and the 
sloping garden, and the eagerly sympathetic Thomas among 
his books within, became a recognized resort of the wandering 
S. T. C. On one occasion he took his young wife, and stayed 
a considerable time. The substantial Poole gave a tangible 
proof of his friendship by collecting ;^4i towards the Watchman 
project ; and Coleridge replied in words of impassioned gratitude. 
He himself refused to regard the matter as mere gratitude. 
"The strong and unmixed affection^^ he wrote, "which I bear 
to you, seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders 
even the principle of esteem latent and inert. . . . God bless you, 
my dear, very dear friend." 

Towards the close of 1796 Coleridge's desultoriness was a 
source of real misery to him, and he turned to Nether Stowey 
and Poole as to a stronghold. Could he but get a house near 
the village, where he might settle down, write poetry, work in 
the garden, and perhaps dabble in farming ! He certainly 
needed all that the proximity of Poole's strong character could 
do for him, for he was neuralgic that autumn ; and alas ! alas ! 
he tried the effect of drops of laudanum on the pain. He was 
worried, he was restless. Was there no simple cottage that 
Poole could recommend ? He called at the Bristol post-office 
daily in search of an encouraging letter from Stowey. At last 
one came ; but it was not very encouraging after all. There 
was a cottage, Poole wrote, but surely it would hardly do ! It 
was in the street ; it was tiny ; it was ugly. But its garden was 
close to Poole's garden ; the Coleridges admitted it was not 



58 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

beautiful, but of course they would take it and try it for a year ; 
they would keep one servant, and Coleridge himself would 
teach her how to cook. 

Dearly as Poole loved Coleridge, he may have, must have, 
had his doubts about the amount of happiness which this migra- 
tion of the impecunious monsieur, madame, et bibe to within 
speaking distance would bring to himself and his relatives. All 
that was unselfish in him also — and how much that was ! — rose 
up to warn Coleridge against such self-burial in a remote village 
of a young writer who ought to be nearer the centre of things, 
at Bristol, if not in London. This prudence kindled Coleridge 
into foolish passion. He wrote in the accents of a thwarted 
lover, and as if he thought Poole wished him evil. In decency, 
therefore, the amiable Poole could protest no more ; the house 
was taken, and Coleridge, with his face " monstrously swollen," 
a sore throat, and rheumatism in head and shoulders, prepared 
to walk to Stowey, and apparently carried out his plan. Shortly 
after his wife followed, with a new friend, Charles Lloyd, a 
young Birmingham banker of poetic gifts and exceedingly 
shaky nerves, whose acquaintance Coleridge had made on one 
of his many journeys. On one of the last days of the " depart- 
ing year," 1796, which Coleridge was immortalizing in song, 
the singular household entered on occupancy of the cottage by 
which the traveller pauses for a moment, curiously and reverently. 
Coleridge " farmed " his one-and-a-half-acre garden, read, wrote, 
walked, meditated, and associated with Charles Lloyd and the 
Pooles. Sometimes he did bits of genuine nursing. "You 
would smile," he writes to a friend, " to see my eye rolling up 
to the ceiling in a lyric fury, and on my knee baby clothes 
pinned to warm ! " 

It was between Nether Stowey and Racedown that the most 
fateful exchange of visits between Coleridge and Wordsworth 
took place. For Coleridge, possessing something which might 
be called a home, felt that he could invite people ; and in July, 
1797, the Wordsworths came to see him. Having once come 
to the Quantocks, they had a mind to stay. 



CHAPTER IV 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 

THE Wordsworths' visit to Nether Stowey, in July, 1797, 
was a great event. In June, Coleridge had been at 
Racedown, reading his tragedy, afterwards published as Re- 
morse to Wordsworth, and forming his very high opinion of 
Wordsworth's Borderers. So the intercourse had not had 
time to cool when the return visit was paid. Modest as were 
the requirements of the poet and his sister, it must have been 
something of a strain on the Coleridges' accommodation and 
cookery to have the Wordsworths for a fortnight. True, Charles 
Lloyd, Coleridge's now constant housemate, was away, at his 
native Birmingham ; but, on the other hand, during part of the 
visit, there was another guest in the Nether Stowey cottage, a 
very important guest indeed. 

One of the " Blues " with Coleridge at Christ's Hospital was 
a boy three years his junior, called Charles Lamb, the son of 
John Lamb, a scrivener, who lived in the Temple and acted as 
a kind oi factotum to a Bencher of the Inner Temple, named 
Samuel Salt. John Lamb had married the daughter of a Hert- 
fordshire yeoman, whose wife was housekeeper at the Plumers' 
mansion of Blakesware, near Widford. It was thus from humble 
surroundings and antecedents that Charles Lamb came ; and, 
when he went to Christ's Hospital, in 1782, he went as one of a 
family of three children (there had been seven), whom his father 
*' found it difficult to maintain and educate without some assist- 
ance." He was a timid, reserved boy, with a bad stammer ; but 
full of sensibility and disposed to hero-worship. He has told us 
how Coleridge seemed to him then, " Logician, metaphysician, 
bard " in embryo ; abnormal, uncouth, even in boyhood, yet, 
even in boyhood, so fascinating, so wonderful. " How have I 

59 



60 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced 
with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between 
the speech and iho. garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee 
unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of 
Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst 
not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in 
his Greek or Pindar — while the walls of the old Grey Friars 
re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy /" 

The friendship begun at Christ's was prolonged into man- 
hood. There was no Cambridge or Oxford for Lamb ; from 
Christ's Hospital he passed, after a short interval, to the brief 
tenure of a clerkship in the South Sea House, to be followed by 
that clerkship in the East India House, which he held for most 
of his life. Never was there a more constant or contented 
Londoner than Lamb ; his only outlet was to the not-far-distant 
Herts, where lovers of Elia know what he found at "Blakes- 
moor " (Blakesware), and " Mackery End." But the peripatetic 
Coleridge, as confirmed a wanderer as Lamb was a stay-at-home, 
used to turn up in London in his Cambridge vacations, and later ; 
and the two old school-fellows met at the " Salutation and Cat," 
just opposite Christ's, and spent long evenings together in an 
atmosphere of tobacco, philosophy, and poetry. The principal 
colloquies took place in December, 1794, in the winter after 
Coleridge had first met Southey, and while Southey, at Bristol, 
was lamenting over Coleridge's absence and indifference both to 
Pantisocracy and his fianc^e^ Sarah Fricker. Soon after, as we 
know, Southey carried Coleridge off to the west country ; and _ , 
for a long time he and Lamb never met. Lamb had a love-^j 
story to occupy him, a romance which left nothing but a pale 
sad moonlight on his life and writings. He lived now in Little 
Queen Street, Holborn, with his disabled father, his mother, 
and his sister Mary, eleven years older than himself. Would 
that nothing worse than disappointed love had been his lot ! 

In the spring of 1796 he began to write to Coleridge letters 
which are among the most priceless epistolary treasures in the 
English language, and which, by an astonishing and happy 
Providence, the casual S.T.C. was led to preserve. Two of 
those letters in that year convey, the one with a sweet humour, 
the other with tragic self-restraint, two pieces of dark news. 
In May Lamb wrote : — " Coleridge, I know not what suffering 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 61 

scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been 
somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last 
year and began this, your very humble servant spent very 
agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat 
rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was." In 
September there was worse news. Lamb had to write of " the 
terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. . . . My poor 
dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of 
her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch 
the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse. 
. . . God has preserved to me my senses ; I eat, and drink, and 
sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound." Coleridge's 
reply was singularly noble : let us hear a few sentences of it, 
lest we should fail to realize the clear depths of a nature in 
which there was so much foolish admixture. " 1 look upon you 
as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation 
of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar 
to God ; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss 
without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at 
the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of 
His character, and, bowed down and crushed underfoot, cry 
in fulness of faith, * Father, Thy will be done.' I wish above 
measure to have you for a little while here — no visitants shall 
blow on the nakedness of your feelings — you shall be quiet, 
and your spirit may be healed. ... I charge you, my dearest 
friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair — you are 
a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an 
eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any 
means it be possible, come to me," 

Lamb's demeanour, in circumstances so awful, was as nearly 
faultless as that of a human being could be. He rallied and 
steadied himself ; he did not falter in daily duty ; he cultivated 
his marvellous literary gift ; he kept his poor alienated sister 
close to his heart. He wrote very often to Coleridge : they had 
many literary matters to discuss, for Coleridge had published his 
first volume of miscellaneous poems in the spring ; and Lamb 
also meant to be a poet. He criticized Coleridge's early efforts 
with that combination of inwardness and minuteness by virtue 
of which he stands alone among English literary critics ; and 
though only twenty-one, and so appreciably Coleridge's junior, 



62 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

he showed, without a trace of priggishness, an unmistakable 
moral superiority to his drifting and groping friend. What 
could be better for Coleridge, in the days when he was feverishly 
reaching his arms towards Nether Stowey and Thomas Poole, 
than to get a letter beginning thus : " My dearest Friend, — I 
grieve from my very soul to observe you, in your plans of life, 
veering about from this hope to the other, and settling nowhere. 
Is it an untoward fatality (speaking humanly) that does this for 
you — a stubborn irresistible concurrence of events ? or lies the 
fault, as I fear it does, in your own mind ? You seem to be 
taking up splendid schemes of fortune only to lay them down 
again ; and your fortunes are an ignis fatims that has been 
conducting you, in thought, from Lancaster Court, Strand, to 
somewhere near Matlock ; then jumping across to Dr. Some- 
body's, whose son's tutor you were likely to be ; and would to 
God the dancing demon may conduct you at last, in peace and 
comfort, to the * life and labours of a cottager.' " 

Well, in July, 1797, the "life and labours of a cottager" had 
been six months in progress, and Charles Lamb was in the 
Bridgwater coach on his way to Nether Stowey to see what 
they were like, and how Coleridge was getting on. He had a 
week's holiday from the India House ; we can fancy how sweet 
must have been the summer air and how soothing the fields as 
he sped to the west country. And Lamb needed stimulus as 
well as soothing, for his London life was monotonous and lonely. 
On June 24 he had written : " I see nobody. I sit and read, 
or walk alone, and hear nothing, I am quite lost to conversa- 
tion from disuse ; and out of the sphere of my little family 
... I see no face that brightens up at my approach." And a 
little later : " I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do 
I desire to see you — to see the young philosopher, to thank 
Sara for her last year's invitation in person — to read your 
tragedy — to read over together our little book — to breathe fresh 
air — to revive in me vivid images of * Sahitation Scenery.' " 

So Lamb and the Wordsworths met under Coleridge's roof, 
and happy hours flowed in the meadows and among the coombs 
of Quantock. One drawback there was. Some kind of slight 
accident befel Coleridge at the beginning of the visit, and dis- 
abled his leg so that he could not form one of the walking- 
parties. One evening while the rest were out, he sat in his little 

I 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 63 

garden under a spreading lime — heavy-sweet with blossom it 
must have been — and put the situation into blank verse. 

" Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, 
This lime-tree bower my prison ! I have lost 
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been 
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age 
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They meanwhile, 
Friends, whom I nevermore may meet again, 
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, 
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, 
To that still roaring dell, of which I told ; 
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, 
And only speckled by the mid-day sun ; 
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock 
Flings arching like a bridge . . . 
. . . Now, my friends emerge 
Beneath the wide wide Heaven — and view again 
The many-steepled tract magnificent 
Of hilly fields, and meadows and the sea. 
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up 
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles 
Of purple shadow ! Yes ! they wander on 
In gladness all ; but thou, methinks, most glad. 
My gentle-hearted Charles ! for thou hast pined 
I And hungered after Nature, many a year, 

In the great City pent, winning thy way 
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain 
And strange calamity ! Ah ! — slowly sink 
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun ! 
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, 
Ye purple heath-flowers ! richlier burn, ye clouds ! 
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves ! 
And kindle, thou blue Ocean ! So my friend, 
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood. . . . 

Nor in this bower. 
This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked 
Much that has soothed me. . . . Henceforth I shall know 
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure ; 
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, 
No waste so vacant, but may well employ 
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart 
Awake to Love and Beauty ! . . . 
My gentle-hearted Charles ! when the last rook 
Beat its straight path along the dusky air 
Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing 



64 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Had cross'd the mighty orb's dilated glory, 
While thou stood'st gazing ; or when all was still, 
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm 
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom 
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life." 

For some reason Charles Lamb, when he read the poem on 
its publication some years later, quite seriously resented the 
epithet " gentle-hearted." " Please . . . substitute," he wrote, 
"drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, 
or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the 
gentleman in question." It is difficult to understand why Lamb 
should have felt so strongly ; perhaps the reiteration was annoy- 
ing ; perhaps, as has been suggested, the words seemed to 
express something of patronage which the younger man may 
have felt in his friend's attitude. In itself, it is surely an epithet 
which the bravest man might be proud to deserve ; and, as 
Wordsworth knew, it was one which surely fitted Charles Lamb. 

" Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
Has vanished from his lonely hearth," 

he was to write in 1835. 

Coleridge's poem renders faithfully the Stowey scenery. 
Dorothy Wordsworth was charmed with the country. " There 
is everything here," she wrote, " sea, woods wild as fancy ever 
painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so 
romantic. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the 
country more romantic ; it has the character of the less grand 
parts of the neighbourhood of the lakes." One spot in particular 
struck her fancy. " William and I, in a wander by ourselves, 
found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills 
covered with full-grown timber trees." Was it the place of 
which Coleridge had sung — 

"That still roaring dell, of which I told"? 

Anyhow, it is for the Wordsworthian a haunted place, and " a 
spirit in his feet " guides him thither when he is in the west 
country. 

Making for the hills, he soon leaves Nether Stowey hidden 
by a turn of the road, and mounts gently, and, on the whole, 
continuously. Soon he is actually among the Quantocks ; they 
fill up the range of his left-hand vision ; on the right he has the 





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"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 65 

not very distant Bristol Channel. At last, when he has passed 
the " Castle of Comfort," once an inn, now a lodging-house, in 
its leafy recess by the roadside, the hills are all about him, and 
are everything in the landscape — ferny knolls ablaze with gorse ; 
delicious coombs dark with dwarfish oak and spreading holly ; 
quarries of dark red Devonian sandstone. As the road turns 
seaward he finds himself in woods of the kind which suggest 
the proximity of a country house. Yet there is no house, no 
entrance-gate to be seen. There is, however, a little woodland 
village with its church and inn and a stream bickering through 
it. Its name is Holford ; and here the Wordsworthian leaves 
the highroad, crosses the stream, and follows it further into the 
recesses of the wood. After some windings he comes to the 
expected gate, and enters on a long avenue, with woods on 
either side, having much undergrowth of shaggy holly, and the 
bickering stream always on his right. Before he scrambles 
down to pry into the stream's secrets, he must go on to see 
whither the avenue is leading him. It is leading him, he finds, 
to a fine many-windowed old mansion. There is a garden in 
front and by the side, but the entrance-door is on the other 
side of the house, looking out on a delightful concave of the 
Quantocks, ferny and shaggy, where deer are browsing. It is 
Alfoxden, or, more strictly, Alfoxton, House, owned, in 1797, 
by the St. Albyns. 

To the house the enthusiast will return presently ; but the 
spirit in his feet will not rest till it has taken him down to the 
deep bed of the stream, where there is a rude bridge, and 
the water whirls and eddies round an islanded rock, making 
quite a little cascade. It is — it must be — Dorothy's place of 
the " sequestered waterfall in a dell." But the spot has more 
definite and memorable associations than these. It is the spot 
which became a " chosen resort " of Wordsworth ; the spot 
which was the birthplace of a new philosophy, a new poetry, of 
Nature and Man. It was here that the lines came into being — 

" I heard a thousand blended notes," etc. 

The domestic arrangements of the Coleridges and Words- 
worths were, in those days at least, so like a fairy-tale, that 
we are not much surprised by anything that happened. We 
know that they had Racedown for nothing from Mr. Pinney 



66 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

of Bristol. To such casual nomads it was the most natural 
thing in the world to leave Racedown for a fortnight's visit and 
never return to it ! Dorothy and her brother wandered along 
the Holford brook until they saw Alfoxden House, and though 
they never thought of living in so fine a mansion, and only 
longed for some cottage near by, the fairies presented them with 
the mansion itself. It was to be let, and let upon terms 
preternatural surely, even in 1797. In the absence of the 
owners the tenant of the house-farm, John Bartholomew, made 
an agreement with William Wordsworth to let to him Alfoxden 
House, furniture, gardens, stables, and coach-house, and to put 
him in immediate possession for one year from the preceding 
midsummer (the date of the agreement being July 14) for 
£2$, free of rates and taxes. And apparently Wordsworth was 
to be allowed to remain on indefinitely, if he desired to do so, at 
the same rent ! 

And so, when the Stowey fortnight was over, when the 
walks and the readings in and talks about poetry in Coleridge's 
cottage had come to an end, when Charles Lamb had gone 
back to London "feeling improvement in the recollection of 
many a casual conversation," and with Wordsworth's lines 
ringing in his ears — 

" Nay, traveller, rest ! This lonely yew-tree stands," etc. 

Wordsworth and his sister went on to take up house at 
Alfoxden. We may suppose that the maid was sent for, or 
even possibly fetched, from Racedown, bringing little Basil 
Montagu in her charge. The settling into the furnished house 
was an easy process for such birds of the air as William and 
Dorothy ; and by August 14 Dorothy was writing : " Here 
we are in a large mansion, in a large park with seventy 
head of deer around us. . . . It was a month yesterday since 
we came. There is furniture enough for a dozen families like 
ours. There is a very excellent garden, well stocked with 
vegetables and fruit. ... In front is a little court, with grass 
plot, gravel walk, and shrubs ; the moss roses were in full 
beauty a month ago. The front of the house is to the south ; 
but it is screened from the sun by a high hill. . . . From the 
end of the house we have a view of the sea . . . and exactly 
opposite the window where I now sit is an immense wood, 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 67 

whose round top from this point has exactly the appearance of 
a mighty dome. . . . Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth 
downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them. . . . 
The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern 
or bilberries, or oak woods. . . . The Tor of Glastonbury is 
before our eyes during more than half of our walk to Stowey ; 
and in the park wherever we go, keeping about fifteen yards 
above the house, it makes a part of our prospect." 

All those things the visitor can see to-day, in a primitive 
solitude, untouched as yet by modern inventions and adapta- 
tions. 

" Our principal inducement," Dorothy wrote, " was Cole- 
ridge's society." The inner significance of the Alfoxden life of 
the Words worths, which lasted just a year, is the association 
with Coleridge. It was so close and constant, and the genius of 
the three was so glowing with early fire, that it was a real 
creative fusion, like the welding of metals. "We are three 
people," said Coleridge, " but only one soul." And the first 
tangible result was Lyrical Ballads^ which changed the face 
of English literature. 

The comings and goings between Nether Stowey and 
Alfoxden were incessant. Almost immediately after the 
Wordsworths entered on possession Coleridge went to stay at 
Alfoxden, and he was followed next morning in time for 
breakfast by Mrs. Coleridge, who brought with her an interesting 
guest. John Thelwall, born in 1764, and therefore a good deal 
older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, the son of a Bristol 
tradesman, was one of the recruits whom the west country 
supplied to the revolutionary liberalism of the time. He 
became an attorney, then a radical journalist ; then a follower 
of Home Tooke, and one of the Society of the Friends of the 
People ; with Home Tooke he went to prison in 1794, an early 
victim of the repressive policy in England, which followed the 
execution of King Louis XVI. in France. He was now sobering 
down, drifting about in search of country quarters, and soon 
to settle at Llyswen on the Upper Wye. He had come to see 
Coleridge on the strength of supposed political sympathy ; and 
Coleridge, though he repudiated most of Thelwall's opinions, 
liked the man, and was glad to introduce him to Wordsworth. 
So " Citizen John," as he was called in the cant revolutionary 



68 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

parlance, was one of the little house-party at Alfoxden in July, 
1797 ; wandering among the woods and hills with the two poets, 
making acquaintance with the dell and its waterfall, and dis- 
cussing all things in heaven and earth. The maid from Race- 
down, if she ever came, had not yet arrived ; an old woman 
from an adjoining cottage did what was necessary in the house. 
Thelwall wrote in raptures to his wife about the place and the 
visit, and especially about the dell with the waterfall. As the 
party were sitting there one day, Coleridge said to Thelwall : 
" Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in ! " and Thel- 
wall replied, " Nay ! Citizen Samuel, it is rather a place to 
make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason." * 
Political orthodoxy in the neighbourhood, as represented by 
the Pooles, was much scandalized by the intimacy with the 
ex-prisoner ; and, as we shall see, the Wordsworths had to 
rue it. 

Five important sources exist as to the Alfoxden life. The 
most vivid is a journal kept by Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798, in 
which the daily life of the "three persons with one soul" is 
faithfully and artlessly mirrored. Another is some lines of 
reminiscence by Wordsworth himself in the last book of The 
Prelude. Thirdly, there is Coleridge's poem, The Nightingale, 
written in April, 1798. Fourthly, there are Wordsworth's and 
Coleridge's prose accounts of the origin of the Lyrical Ballads. 
Lastly, and best of all, there is the totality of the work of the 
two poets which originated at Nether Stowey and Alfoxden. 

Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden journal gives good earnest 
of her wonderful journal of the Wordsworths' tour in Scotland in 
1803, which, when first published in its fulness more than thirty 
years ago, revealed to the world the dimensions of her genius. 
There is not a sentence of the Alfoxden entries which does not 
testify to originality and individuality ; to the seeing eye, the 
understanding heart, and the power of choosing in expression the 
smiting, revealing, unforgettable word. The very artlessness of 
the writing, and the tameness (as the majority would estimate 
it) of the experiences, make the fragment the more precious. 
Sentences, phrases, taken at random, are enough to show what a 
companion for poets was this girl. "After the wet, dark days, 

* So, substantially, the anecdote appears in Coleridge's " Table-Talk," Words- 
worth tells it diiFerently in his notes on the poem An Anecdote, for Fathers. 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 69 

the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sun- 
beams." " Moss cups more proper than acorns for fairy goblets." 
" The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, 
which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly 
to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of 
the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise 
which lives in the summer air." " The half-dead sound of the 
near sheep-bell." " The shapes of the mist, slowly moving 
along, exquisitely beautiful ; passing over the sheep they almost 
seemed to have more of life than those quiet creatures." One 
might go on quoting without limit. What other English prose 
of the sort, so careful, so loving, so imaginative, is there to be 
found at that epoch ? 

One or two of the entries point curiously beyond themselves. 
Here, for example, is an entry for March 7. "William and 
I drank tea at Coleridge's. . . . Observed nothing particularly 
interesting. . . . One only leaf upon the top of a tree — the sole 
remaining leaf — danced round and round like a rag blown by 
the wind." Surely they must have talked of that leaf at 
Coleridge's tea-table, or had Coleridge a sight of the entry 
afterwards .? For who does not know the stanza of Christabelf 

" The night is chill ; the forest bare ; 
Is it the wind that nioaneth bleak ? 
There is not wind enough in the air 
To move away the ringlet curl 
From the lovely lady's cheek — 
There is not wind enough to twirl 
The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
That dances as often as dance it can, 
Hanging so light, and hanging so high 
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." 

Again, is this only a coincidence? "January 31. When 
we left home the moon immensely large, the sky scattered over 
with clouds. These soon closed in, contracting the dimensions 
of the moon without concealing her." So far Dorothy. Now 
hear Coleridge — 

'• Is the night chilly and dark ? 

The night is chilly, but not dark, 

The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 

It covers but not hides the sky. 

The moon is behind, and at the full ; 

And yet she looks both small and dull." 



70 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Naturally, there are several links between the Journal and 
Wordsworth's poems written at this time. E.g., hear Dorothy : — 
" Went to Poole's after tea. The sky spread over with one 
continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, 
though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so 
strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At 
once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in 
the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed 
by multitudes of stars, small and bright and sharp. Their 
brightness seemed concentrated." And now hear William's 
blank verse : — 

" The sky is overcast 
With a continuous cloud of texture close, 
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon, 
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen, 
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light 
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls. 
Chequering the ground — from rock, plant, tree, or tower. 
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam 
Startles the pensive traveller while he treads 
His lonesome path with unobserving eye 
Bent earthwards ; he looks up — the clouds are split 
Asunder, — and above his head he sees 
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. 
There, in a black-blue vault, she sails along, 
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small, 
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss 
Drive as she drives ! how fast they wheel away, 
Yet vanish not ! — the wind is in the tree, 
But they are silent ;— still they roll along 
Immeasurably distant ; and the vault. 
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, 
Still deepens its unfathomable depth. 
At length the Vision closes ; and the mind ; 
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels. 
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm. 
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene." 

Here, it is evident, there is more than resemblance or sug- 
gestion ; there is joint composition of a very interesting kind. 
In a note to the poem, Wordsworth tells us that it was 
composed extempore on the road as he walked along, and 
one cannot doubt the correctness of his memory. Between 
the extemporaneous versifier and the artless journal-writer 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 71 

there could be no question of plagiarism or ^//^^/-plagiarism. 
How, then, are we to explain the relations between Dorothy 
Wordsworth's Journal and the contemporaneous poems of her 
brother and of Coleridge ? 

In all the instances which have been here brought forward 
there is either close paraphrase or actual identity in expression. 
Dorothy's "one only leaf upon the top of a tree — the sole 
remaining leaf — danced round and round like a rag " appears 
in Coleridge's version as — 

" The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
That dances as often as dance it can, 
Hanging so light, and hanging so high." 

Dorothy's " clouds soon closed in, contracting the dimensions 
of the moon without concealing her," is mutatis mutandis, 
Coleridge's — 

" The thin gray cloud is spread on high. 
The moon is behind and at the full, 
And yet she looks both small and dull." 

In the third instance, that of Wordsworth's Night Piece, 
there is actual identity, in many cases, of phrases and epithets. 
" A continuous cloud," " whitened by the moon," " chequering 
the ground," "the black-blue vault," above all the wonderful 
trinity of epithets for the stars, " small, and bright, and s/iarp," 
are as nearly as possible identical. How are we to suppose 
that the work of expression was divided ? 

Wordsworth, he has told us, composed his Night Piece as he 
walked ; and, therefore, he cannot have got his phrases from 
his sister's journal. On the other hand, Coleridge does not 
seem to have been with Dorothy when she saw the dancing 
red leaf and the moon contracted in dimensions " by the gray 
cloud " ; and, therefore, he would seem to have learned of them 
from her. 

I think there is a strong presumption that, in all those cases, 
the close observer, and possibly the originator of the distinctive 
phrases and epithets, was Dorothy. We know of similar 
instances of adoption from one another among the members 
of the Words worths' circle. The lines from Tlie Ancient 
Mariner — 

" And thou art long and lank and brown 
As is the ribb'd sea-sand," 



72 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 






were presented to Coleridge by Wordsworth. Wordsworth's 
phrase in his Daffodils, — "That inward eye which is the bliss 
of solitude" was given him by his wife. Wordsworth said 
of his sister in well-known lines : She gave me eyes. And 
Coleridge wrote of her in her goings out and in at Alfoxden — 

". . . A most gentle Maid 

at latest eve 

(Even like a lady vowed and dedicate 

To something more than Nature in the grove) 

Glides through the pathways ; she knows all their notes, 

That gentle Maid ! " 

Is it too much to suppose that to both her two poet 
companions Dorothy may have supplied much of the minute 
observation, which Nature-poetry requires, and that imaginative 
insight into detail which is expressed by perfect epithet and 
incisive phrase ? May we not feel sure that Coleridge's im- 
mortal pictures of dancing leaf and clouded moon were really 
hers, and that they got only their final touch of magic from him ? 
Can we not hear the Night Piece coming into being between 
brother and sister on the Stowey road — his the rhythm, hers 
the wording at critical and cardinal points ; wholly his the 
characteristic introspection at the end — 

" At length the vision closes ; and the mind, 
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels. 
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, 
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene "? 

In fact, neither the poetry of Coleridge nor that of Words- 
worth is characterized by the careful — though always purely 
aesthetic — registration of natural effects which we find in the 
Alfoxden Journal. It was the dower of the gentle maid who 
glided along the wild-wood paths and knew all the nightingale's 
notes. 

To the constant and complete companionship of the trio, 
Dorothy's Journal bears ample testimony. "With Coleridge" 
is a constant entry ; with Coleridge on the Stowey road in 
early spring days, " the midges or small flies spinning in the 
sunshine ; " with Coleridge over the hills, " the sea at first 
obscured by vapour. ... I never saw such a union of earth, 
sky and sea ; " with Coleridge gathering sticks in the wood ; 
with Coleridge listening to redbreasts in dripping February 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 73 

snow, or on May evenings seeing the glow-worm and listening 
to the nightingale. 

In the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth refers to this 
idyllic time in lines of grave and affectionate reminiscence. It 
was^'still the time, let us never forget, of the healing of his soul 
which he attributed in so large measure to Dorothy. He has, 
therefore, much to say of her, of her planting of flowers in the 
crevices of his nature ; of her breath going before his steps like 
a gentler spring in spring. But much of his recovery and 
adornment he traces to Coleridge, and his kindred influence. 
The result must have been marvellous, for it finds marvellous 
expression — 

" Thus fear relaxed 
Her overweening grasp ; thus thoughts and things 
In the self-haunting spirit learned to take 
More rational proportions ; mystery, 
The incumbent mystery of sense and soul, 
Of life and death, time and eternity, 
Admitted more habitually a mild 
Interposition — a serene delight 
In closelier gathering cares, such as become 
A human creature, howsoe'er endowed. 
Poet, or destined for a humbler name ; 
And so the deep enthusiastic joy, 
The rapture of the hallelujah sent 

From all that breathes and is, was chastened, stemmed 
And balanced by pathetic truth, by trust 
In hopeful reason, leaning on the stay 
Of Providence ; and in reverence for duty. 
Here, if need be, struggling with storms, and there 
Strewing in peace life's humblest ground with herbs. 
At every season green, sweet at all hours." 

In particular, there stood out in Wordsworth's memory one 
summer. Internal evidence shows that it was the second half- 
summer spent at Alfoxden, that of 1798, the year of Lyrical 
Ballads. 

" That summer, under whose indulgent skies, 
Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved, 
Unchecked, or loitered 'mid her sylvan coombs, 
Thou, in bewitching words, with happy heart, 
Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man, 
The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes 
Didst utter of the Lady Christabel ; 



74 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

And I, associate with such labour, steeped 

In soft forgetfulness the livelong hours, 

Murmuring of him who, joyous hap, was found, 

After the perils of his moonlight ride, 

Near the loud waterfall ; or her who sate 

In misery near the miserable Thorn — 

When thou dost to that summer turn thy thoughts. 

And hast before thee all which then we were, 

To thee, in memory of that happiness, 

It will be known, by thee at least, my Friend ! 

Felt, that the history of a Poet's mind 

Is labour not unworthy of regard." 

Coleridge's poem, The Nightingale, is in a lighter vein, but 
equally inspired by the time, the place, and the companionship. 
The poem is very interesting, and full of beauty, though (as 
was often the case with Coleridge), unequal in style. Its main 
interest lies in its treatment of Nature ; in the revelation it 
gives of Coleridge's individual attitude towards the non-human 
natural world. That attitude is at once Wordsworthian and not. 
The trio are sitting, in a moonless night — every trace of sunset 
faded, and dim stars overhead — on a bridge over a soundless 
stream. The poet blames Milton's phrase about the nightingale, 
most musical, most melancholy ! which he holds to be vitiated by 
what Ruskin called the "pathetic fallacy," the transference of 
human feeling — in this case morbid — to natural objects. In an 
essentially Wordsworthian strain, he calls on the poet who 
would know Nature aright to forget her moods and yield him- 
self to her. Let him stretch his limbs — 

" Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell. 
By sun or moonlight, to the influxes 
Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements 
Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song 
And of his fame forgetful ! so his fame 
Should share in Nature's immortality, 
A venerable thing ! And so his song 
Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself 
Be loved like Nature ! " 

He goes on to translate the nightingale's singing into a 
strain too romantic, with too much of the jewellery of magic, for 
Wordsworth — 

" 'Tis the merry Nightingale 
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 75 

With fast thick warble his delicious notes, 
As he were fearful that an April night 
Would be too short for him to utter forth 
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul 
Of all its music!" 

Alfoxden and Dorothy follow, both lifted into the world of 
faery — 

" And I know a grove 
Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, 
Which the great lord inhabits not ; and so 
This grove is wild with tangling underwood. 
And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, 
Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths. 
But never elsewhere in one place I knew 
So many nightingales ; and far and near, 
In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, 
They answer and provoke each other's songs, 
With skirmish and capricious passagings, 
And murmurs musical and swift jug-jug. 
And one low piping sound more sweet than all — 
Stirring the air with such an harmony. 
That should you close your eyes, you might almost 
Forget it was not day ! On moonlight bushes, 
Whose dewy leaflets are but half-disclosed. 
You may perchance behold them on the twigs, 
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, 
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade 
Lights up her love-torch." 

And now comes Dorothy, in words some of which we have 
heard before ; with a tribute to her insight into Nature. 

"A most gentle Maid 
Who dwelleth in her hospitable home 
Hard by the castle, and at latest eve 
(Even like a Lady vowed and dedicate 
To something more than Nature in the grove) 
Glides through the pathways ; she knows all their notes, 
That gentle Maid ! and oft, a moment's space. 
What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, 
Hath heard a pause of silence ; till the moon 
Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky 
With one sensation, and those wakeful birds 
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, 
As if some sudden gale had swept at once 
A hundred airy harps ! And she hath watched 



76 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Many a nightingale perch giddily 
On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze, 
And to that motion time his wanton song 
Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head." 

Such nights were these at Alfoxden ! And then. the break- 
up, typical of almost nightly breaks-up — 

" Farewell, O Warbler ! till to-morrow eve, 
And you, my friends, farewell, a short farewell ! 
We have been loitering long, and pleasantly, 
And now for our dear homes.'' 

And, after a pretty story about how one of his baby's 
" night-fears " was banished by his father's taking him out and 
showing him the moon in the orchard — 

" Once more, farewell. 
Sweet Nightingale ! once more, my friends ! farewell." 

Coleridge's Nightingale was one of the Lyrical Ballads ; and 
it is time now to speak of them, and what their makers meant 
by them and said about them. For it was to them that all this 
Quantock life led up. 

Joint ventures in poetry were common in those days : Lovell 
and Southey co-operated ; so did Lamb and Charles Lloyd. 
Coleridge and Wordsworth very seriously intended to be poets ; 
and as they walked about they made not only poetry, but plans. 
One hardly serious idea was a prose-poem called the Wander- 
ings of Cain, to consist of three cantos, of which Wordsworth 
was to write the first, and Coleridge the second. Whichever had 
first finished his task was to do the third. The whole work 
was to be completed in one night ! Such tours de force were 
not in Wordsworth's line ; and when Coleridge brought his 
canto, he found his colleague gazing with a " look of humorous 
despondency " at an almost blank sheet of paper. Coleridge's 
canto may still be read, with a characteristically melodious 
fragment of verse, the first instalment of what was to have 
been a poem on the same theme. 

" Encinctured with a twine of leaves. 
That leafy twine his only dress ! 
A lovely Boy was plucking fruits, 
By moonlight, in a wilderness." 

Another plan was ambitious and grandiose. In the minds 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 77 

of both men the underlying interest was the interrelations of 
Man, Society, and Nature ; the distant roar of French affairs 
was still in their ears, and mixed itself with the sounds of 
breeze and bird and stream in Somerset. While Wordsworth, 
.at ease in the Alfoxden dell, looked at the sweet fellowship of 
primrose and periwinkle on the steep banks, he thought with 
pain of the "madding passions, mutually inflamed," of 
humanity — 

" Much it grieved my heart to think 
What man has made of man." 

As Coleridge walked on the high table-lands of Quantock and 
among its sloping coombs, and looked at streamlets rising 
among "yellow-red moss" and "conical glass-shaped tufts of 
bent," becoming audible in little water-breaks, and working 
their way on and down, by lonely barn and sheepfold, to 
hamlet and village and then to sea-port and sea, he saw in 
them types of human society, on which a great poem might be 
built. Wordsworth's imagination, as we shall find, was to work 
towards the same end. But not yet ; and meanwhile a simpler 
plan suggested itself. 

In November, 1797, the trio set out on a longer expedition 
than usual. They were to round Quantock at the seaward end 
by Watchet, and make their way along the grand coast to 
Lynmouth, Lynton, and the Valley of Rocks. It was to be all 
done on foot ; but there were inevitable expenses, and these 
were to be defrayed by a joint-poem, which they hoped would 
bring in £s. As they walked along under November skies, 
and before Watchet was reached, Coleridge told of a dream 
which had befallen a friend of his, about a skeleton ship with 
figures in it. Coleridge made a story out of the dream ; and 
Wordsworth suggested a moral. He had been reading in 
Shelvocke's Voyages about the albatrosses which abound near 
Cape Horn. Let us make the navigators wantonly destroy one 
of these birds, he suggested, and be punished by their tutelary 
spirits. So the plan developed, Wordsworth contributing the 
idea of the ship's being navigated by dead men, but nothing 
else towards its structure. The same evening they began to 
write, the lead being taken by Coleridge, but Wordsworth 
contributing some lines. 



78 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

It was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner which had its origin 
that day. As a joint-composition it failed as completely as the 
Wanderings of Cain. From first to last, in conception and 
execution, m general scheme and in details, it bore Coleridge's 
unmistakable and inalienable sign-manual. Wordsworth soon 
gave up the completion of the Old Navigator's story into his 
friend s hands ; and it is improbable that much more of it was 
written during the November walking-tour. The project of a 
poem to pay expenses was given up, and the joint plans of the 
poets took a wider shape. 

In their Stowey and Alfoxden intercourse, Wordsworth and 
Coleridge had many discussions about the theory of poetry 
and the functions of that faculty of imagination from which 
what IS greatest in poetry comes. Each was occupied in the 
making of poems instinct with the individuality of powerful 
young genius ; so theory and practice suggested one another in 
the most natural manner, and poetry and the criticism of poetry 
went hand in hand. Standing on the edge of the Romantic 
Revival, both poets were deeply conscious of two things- 
namely, that poetry ought to give pleasure by the surprise of 
novelty; and that, since Milton, it had relied too much on arti- 
ficial magniloquence and violent improbability for that purpose. 
1 here must, they agreed, be a "return to Nature," if the power 
and charm of poetry were to be legitimate; and that return 
could only be made by the stern avoidance of artificiality and 
conventionahty in expression, and the production of novelty by 
the spontaneous exercise of imagination. The proper subjects 
of poetry were natural, and in that sense ordinary ; but they 
must be made extraordinary, surprising, novel, by the poet's 
imaginative treatment, as a common landscape is transfigured 
by a sudden gush of sunset or moonlight. And now, two 
different methods of treatment suggested themselves. Poetry 
must be true to fact, true to the realities of human nature ; but 
it need not reject the preternatural. Introduce a preternatural 
machinery if you will ; but only on condition that it somehow 
helps the presentment of the natural. Present the illusory if 
you will; but only if thereby you may the better stimulate 
emotion which captures and holds, not by its unreality but by 
Its mtense reality. But then, on the other hand, the poet might 
dispense with the preternatural or even with the explicitly 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 79 

romantic, and, without suffering imagination to abdicate any of 
its functions, might find, in the persons, scenes, and incidents 
of ordinary experience, the novelty and surprise which poetry 
requires, until the natural should seem preternatural. 

A series of poems was to be written illustrating these two 
methods. Coleridge, who affected the preternatural more than 
Wordsworth, Coleridge who had taken the lead in the Ancient 
Mariner, was to choose preternatural and " romantic " themes ; 
Wordsworth was to exhibit the romance of every-day ex- 
perience. 

Accordingly, through the second Alfoxden half year, in the 
spring and summer of 1798, the double task proceeded, but in a 
most unequal manner. Coleridge had appropriated the com- 
pletion of the A ncient Mariner ,♦ but Wordsworth outran his 
desultory colleague in the preparation of Lyrical Ballads. 
Coleridge finished the Mariner, and wrote also the first part of 
Christabel, and a fragment called the Dark Ladie ; but neither 
Christabel, nor the Dark Ladie appeared in the joint-volume. 
The Mariner was the sole representative of the preternatural 
poetry ; and Coleridge added to it only the Nightingale poem, 
which we know already, and one or two dramatic fragments. 
Wordsworth on the other hand, worked industriously at his 
object, viz. " to give the charm of novelty to things of every 
day " ; and produced, as he tells us. The Idiot Boy ; the lines 
beginning, Her Eyes are Wild; We are Seven ; The Thorn ,• and 
others. 

The friendly Joseph Cottle was of course to be the publisher. 
He went to see the poets in May, staying for a week at 
Alfoxden with Wordsworth. The authors and the publisher 
conferred about the volume ; they made another expedition to 
Lynton and the Valley of Rocks. The volume was to be called 
Lyrical Ballads ; it was to be published forthwith ; and Cottle 
was to give thirty guineas for the copyright. The proofs 
were corrected in the course of the summer, and the book 
appeared in September. It was a small volume, of two hundred 
and ten pages. 

Such is the external history of a book which initiated the 
higher Romanticism in England and brought Wordsworth into 
the front rank of English poetry. So slight was Coleridge's 
share in it that the work was essentially Wordsworth's ; and by 



80 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

it alone we may almost say that Wordsworth stands or falls. 
Here is his characteristic strength, here his characteristic weak- 
ness ; here, born among the Alfoxden hollies and the ferny 
coombs of Quantock, is that poetry of Nature, that philosophy 
of common life, which has been a religion or a mockery to 
succeeding generations. 

It is, first of all, as the outcome of a gentle open-air life, 
the life reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, that these 
poems interest us. The Wordsworthian visitor to the west 
country, as he journeys piously between Alfoxden and Nether 
Stowey, sees the Lyrical Ballads written large everywhere. In 
the green meadow outside the Alfoxden gate, is the place which 
held the cottage of "Simon Lee" the old huntsman, whom 
Wordsworth places in " the sweet shire of Cardigan," but who 
was really huntsman to the Alfoxden squires, the old man 
whom the poet, with his strong sinews, once helped to unearth 
the stump of a tree, and who poured forth thanks and praises 
in such abundance that Wordsworth thought, " They never 
would have done." At the door of Alfoxden House stood the 
tall larch on which the redbreast sang that " first mild day of 
March " which will live, we may predict, till time shall be no 
longer. At the same spot, and at the same jocund season, 
Wordsworth put little Basil Montagu into the ethical difficulty 
from which only the Alfoxden weathercock could extricate 
him. Once more, it was in front of Alfoxden House (with the 
usual mystification as to persons and places) that the brace of 
dialogues known as Expostulation and Reply and The Tables 
Turned was made, in which the simplest verse is made to 
express the deepest Wordsworthian thought. In the Alfoxden 
groves walking up and down, the poet bethought him of the 
little girl he had talked to at Goodrich five years before, the 
girl who would not admit that death had really removed 
any of her dear ones. Beginning his verses with the child's 
impregnable phrase, " Nay, we are Seven ! " Wordsworth 
made the poem we know, and took it in to read it to 
Dorothy and Coleridge. As it stood it began with the 
second stanza — 

" I met a little cottage girl ; " 
and Wordsworth felt that it needed an introductory verse. " I 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 81 

want to make one before tea," he said ; whereupon Coleridge 
suggested the line — 

"A simple child, dear brother Jem," etc. 

(" Dear brother Jem " was a common friend, and the allusion was 
a freak). Wordsworth adopted the line promptly ; and, though 
dear brother Jem himself objected, the line remained the first 
of We are Seven in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, The 
Thorn grew on the Quantocks, and Wordsworth fitted a legend 
to it The Last of the Flock was a Holford story. The Idiot 
Boy, the mark of so many satiric shafts, was made on foot 
among the Alfoxden hollies, on a theme supplied by Thomas 
Poole, viz. the idiot's phrase in the last stanza — 

" The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, 
And the sun did shine so cold ! " 

The Alfoxden poetry of Wordsworth is not all to be found 
between the boards of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. 
Peter Bell also was written within those groves, though not 
published until 1819 ; and the greater part of The Old Qimber- 
land Beggar. 

What is the inner significance of it all } The criticism, 
favourable and unfavourable, passed on Wordsworth's early 
poetry by his contemporaries is full of interest and importance ; 
but the interest and importance belong to the history of criticism 
rather than to the history of poetry. As readers of poetry, what 
we now ask is not what Southey or Jeffrey or Charles Lamb 
thought of the Lyrical Ballads, but what we ourselves think and 
feel about them, we ourselves, remembering what went before 
them, and what has come after, and dowered at least with the 
sure intuition of posterity, that intuition which nothing short 
of genius can confer on the contemporary reviewer. What is it, 
then, that we think and feel } 

With regard to the West-country poetry of both Coleridge 
and Wordsworth, we realize, to begin with, that it stretches far 
beyond the bounds of the plan on which much of it was under- 
taken. We ought to judge it relatively to that plan ; but we 
ought also to judge it absolutely. In so far as the plan was a 
joint one, we have already seen that it at once broke down. 
Wordsworth not only avoided the preternatural ; he theoretically 



82 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

despised it. This is clearly set forth in the prologue to Peter 
Bell. 

Again, as regards his own particular object, the operation of 
imagination on lowly themes, expressed in ordinary language, 
Wordsworth, even thus early, attained a far more than merely 
controversial success. He really contributed richly to the 
poetry of common life, and did not merely illustrate argumenta- 
tive assertions about it. He really understood and interpreted 
Nature, and did not merely show how it ought to be interpreted 
and understood. He took his place in a trinity, of which the 
other two members were Blake and Burns, a trinity of reformers 
indeed, but also of absolutely great poets. Burns met his 
unhappy fate two years and a half before Lyrical Ballads, In 
July, 1796, when poetic life was opening for Wordsworth at 
Racedown, Burns, on the Solway flats, was pleading, like the 
dying Goethe, for " more light." " Let him shine," he said to 
the friend whose kind hand would have warded off from his eyes 
the level rays of the low sun sinking to the Galloway hills ; " Let 
him shine ; he'll not shine long for me." Wordsworth knew 
one of the great things that Burns had done for British poetry, 
and felt the blow of his death. " I mourned," he was to write 
afterwards — 

" I mourned with thousands, but as one 
More deeply grieved, for He was gone 
Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 

And showed my youth 
How verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth." 

And the force of the Lyrical Ballads is less fully conveyed by 
any of Wordsworth's or Coleridge's apologiae, than, by anticipa- 
tion, in the stanzas in which Burns commemorates his own call 
and consecration to the poet's mission, when Coila, the Muse, 
told him how she had watched his early development. 

It is interesting to notice that so far was Burns from looking 
on himself as a great reformer, that he felt hopeless of rivalling 
the excellence of those eighteenth-century poets, Thomson, 
Shenstone, Gray, whom we hardly read, and whom Wordsworth 
would hardly deign to commend. 

In Blake there are many tones not to be heard in Words- 
worth ; but the Songs of Innocence had been ten years before 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 83 

the world when the Lyrical Ballads appeared ; and they came 
from the self-same fount — 

" And I plucked a hollow reed, 
And I made a rural pen, 
And I stained the water clear, 
And I wrote my happy songs 
Every child may joy to hear." 

To hiiild a princely throne on humble trtith. That, as Words- 
worth truly divined, was Burns' ideal, and it was, even in the 
Lyrical Ballads, his own striking achievement. The humility 
of the truth all readers will be ready to admit ; but there will be 
question as to the princeliness of the throne. In spite of the poet's 
comprehensive and repeated repudiations of preternaturalism, 
The Thorn is as instinct with the preternatural as any old-world 
ballad or as Christabel itself The power of uncanny suggestion 
is freely used in it. Wordsworth's object was to invent a story 
which should express the genius of a stunted thorn as he saw it 
tormented by storm on the Quantocks. By the thorn there was 
a muddy pond, and not far off a mossy mound, enchanting in 
green and vermilion. From the beginning these three objects 
are treated with an intensity which requires suggestion for its 
realization. The lichens and mosses on the thorn are malign 
things : they are bent — 

** With plain and manifest intent 
To drag it to the ground ; 
And all have joined in one endeavour 
To bury this poor thorn for ever." 

The muddy pond calls out for a dead body. " The heap of 
earth o'ergrown with moss," " so fresh in all its beauteous dyes," 
is so like an infant's grave that an infant must somehow be 
buried there. And so we are brought to a woman in a scarlet 
cloak crying mysteriously by day and by night, 

" Oh misery ! oh misery ! 
Oh woe is me ! oh misery ! " 

The cause of her misery no man may know for certain. " They 
say " this and " They say " that about it. There was a seduc- 
tion, of course ; a desertion, and a child. Yet stay ; was there 
a child ? 



84 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" No earthly tongue could ever tell." But some there are 
who maintain that cries come on winter nights from the place 
where the thorn grows ; and some will "swear" that among the 
cries are voices of the dead. Did the mother hang her baby on 
the tree or drown it in the pond ? Anyhow one thing is 
certain ; if there was a baby it is buried under the lovely mound. 
Some say the vermilion cups are drops of infant's blood ; others 
that a baby's face looks up at you from the face of the pond. 
Others relate that when justice, suspecting murder, was about 
to dig for infant's bones, the hill of moss plainly moved, and the 
grass all round was alive with shudderings ! As to all this the 
poet knows nothing. Only the tree remains, the tree he saw, 
with the figure he imagined : — 

" I cannot tell how this may be, 
But plain it is the Thorn is bound 
With heavy tufts of moss that strive 
To drag it to the ground ; 
And this I know, full many a time, 
When she was on the mountain high. 
By day, and in the silent night, 
When all the stars shone clear and bright. 
That I have heard her cry. 
Oh misery ! oh misery ! 
Oh woe is me ! oh misery ! " 

Preternaturalism, however, plays a small part in this early 
poetry of Wordsworth. The deepest burden of the Lyrical 
Ballads is the characteristic Wordsworthian philosophy of 
Nature and Man which appears in them. In its most profoundly 
suggestive form, that philosophy is expressed in some of the 
slightest of the poems. In the Lines written in Early Spring, 
for example, the primroses and periwinkles of the Alfoxden 
dell, the budding twigs and " twinkling " birds, suggest what 
seems a mere play of fancy, but is, in Wordsworth, an interpre- 
tation of the Universe. To the poet, as he lay in that sweet 
place, there came the conviction, not only of life, all round him, 
not only of beauty, but of sentient pleasure. 

" Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower 
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths, 
And 'tis my faith that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes. 



"THREE PEOPLE. ONE SOUL^' 85 

The budding twigs spread forth their fan 

To catch the breezy air. 
And I must think, do all I can, 

That there was pleasure there." 

And the belief in Nature as happily, beautifully, and even self- 
consciously, alive, immediately suggests the contrasted picture 
of humanity. 

" If this belief from Heaven be sent, 
If such be Nature's holy plan, 
Have I not reason to lament 
What man has made of man ? " 

Again in the poems called Expostulation and Reply, and The 
Tables Turned^ as well as in the lines beginning — 

" It is the first mild day of March," 

the spiritual activities of Nature are indicated with startling 
freshness. 

" Love, now a universal birth 

From heart to heart is stealing. 
From earth to man, from man to earth : 
It is the hour of feeling. 

" And from the blessed power that rolls 
About, below, above, 
We'll frame the measure of our souls, 
They shall be tuned to love." 

" Nor less I deem that there are Powers 

Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness." 

" Let Nature be your teacher. 
She has a world of ready wealth, 

Our minds and hearts to bless, 
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 

Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 

" One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good. 
Than all the sages can." 

The Alfoxden poetry of Wordsworth stands out as a poetry 
of humble life. In reading it we may forget the poet's theoretic 



86 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

claim for peasants and their language, and enjoy (or otherwise) 
the poetry as poetry. Does it justify itself? Such a poetry 
has three incontestable claims. It may plead the oneness of 
the human nature common to all men, with its potentialities of 
grandeur and tragedy ; it lends itself to pathos ; and it lends 
itself to humour. Which of these claims is satisfied by the first 
edition of Lyrical Ballads, or by any of the west country poetry 
outside the limits of that edition ? 

In this early work Wordsworth as yet hardly touches the 
tragic or sublime in human life. Her Eyes are Wild is tragedy, 
passionate tragedy. The tragedy in The Thorn and The Forsaken 
Indian Woman is purely artificial. Perhaps the dignity of the 
peasant is most worthily shown in The Old Cuniberlaftd Beggar , 
with its beautiful ^&nda.n\., Animal Tranquillity and Decay. The 
political economy indeed of the former is dubious : on that side 
the poem is a plea for mendicancy as against the workhouse. 
But it is also a plea for something very different, for the 
greatness of man as man. 

" 'Tis Nature's law 
That none, the meanest of created things, 
Or forms created the most vile and brute, 
The dullest or most noxious, should exist 
Divorced from good — a spirit and pulse of good, 
A life and soul, to every mode of being 
Inseparably linked. Then be assured 
That least of all can aught that ever owned 
The heaven-regarding eye and front sublime 
Which man is born to — sink, howe'er depressed, 
So low as to be scorned without a sin." 

And the sunset of humble life shines grandly in the pendant 
lines — 

" The little hedgerow birds 
That peck along the roads, regard him not. 
He travels on, and in his face, his step. 
His gait, is one expression ; every limb, 
His look and bending figure, all bespeak 
A man who does not move with pain, but moves 
With thought. He is insensibly subdued 
To settled quiet ; he is one by whom 
All effort seems forgotten ; one to whom 
Long patience hath such mild composure given 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 87 

That patience now doth seem a thing of which 
He hath no need. He is by nature led 
To peace so perfect that the young behold 
With envy, what the old man hardly feels." 

In one or two of the poems, Wordsworth shows that incon- 
stant sense of dignity which has been one of the chief stumbling- 
blocks to his admirers. The humble, as he recognized to the 
blessing of the world, is a fit theme of poetry ; the trivial, he was 
apt to forget, is not. Simon Lee, in spite of beautiful phrases, 
beautiful lines, in spite of its delicate poetic appreciativeness, is 
trivial in many places, and is dangerously near triviality through- 
out. But perhaps TJie Last of the Flock sins most seriously 
against the great law of dignity. The poet meets a man on the 
public road near Holford, a man in tears, carrying a lamb in his 
arms. 

" He saw me, and he turned aside, 
As if he wished himself to hide ; 
And with his coat did then essay 
To wipe those briny tears away. 
I followed him, and said, ' My friend, 
What ails you ? Wherefore weep you so ? ' 
' Shame on me, sir ! this lusty lamb. 
He makes my tears to flow. 
To-day I fetched him from the rock ; 
He is the last of all my flock.'" 

This lachrymose person is another victim of the dismal 
science. He started life with a capital of one ewe, from which 
he raised fifty sheep. We are given a most incomplete account 
of the flockmaster's circumstances ; but, apparently, he could not 
support his six children on his income. He therefore applied 
for parish relief, and was told that he must use up his capital 
before he could be entitled to receive it. This, with much 
natural agitation, he proceeded to do. Quite naturally also — 

" Every week and every day, 
My flock it seemed [why seemed ?j to melt away. 
They dwindled. Sir, sad sight to see ! 
From ten to five, from five to three, 
A lamb, a wether, and a ewe ; — 
And then at last from three to two ; 
And of my fifty, yesterday 
I had but only one : 



■ 



88 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

And here it lies upon my arm, 
Alas ! and I have none ; — 
To-day I fetched it from the rock ; 
It is the last of all my flock." 

In this poem the pathos is nullified by the obscurity and 
doubtful ethics of the situation, and the unmanly nervelessness 
of the hero. From such art, we feel, the dignity of the humble 
can gain nothing. 

It may seem paradoxical to say so, but it is surely true, that 
a large part of the significance, and the significance for good, of 
the Alfoxden poetry depends upon that quality with which 
Wordsworth was so slenderly endowed, viz. humour. Words- 
worth's humour was a relatively small element in his constitu- 
tion ; but it was there, and it was genuine, and of the first 
Lyrical Ballads and of Peter Bell it is a main inspiration. The 
failure to recognize it explains and condemns much of the 
ridicule with which Wordsworth's early poetry was greeted. 
Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy, and Peter Bell are essentially 
humorous poems, and, realized as such, there seems no reason 
why they should seem ridiculous or other than successful and 
delightful. Goody Blake is a ballad-idyll of peasant life, in 
which a delicate sprinkling of preternatural suggestion is laid 
on a basis of verisimilitude in incident, the excellence of the 
lyrical style being secured by the humour of the treatment. 
Contrast it in this respect with The Last of the Flock, where 
there is no humour. 

The flockmaster is poor — 

" Six Children, Sir ! had I to feed ; 
Hard labour in a time of need ! 
My pride was tamed, and in our grief 
I of the Parish asked relief. 
They said, I was a wealthy man ; 
My sheep upon the uplands fed, 
And it was fit that thence I took 
Whereof to buy us bread. 
Do this ; how can we give to you, 
They cried, what to the poor is due ? " 

There is no charm of lyrical style there. 
Goody Blake is poor — 

*' O joy for her ! whene'er in winter 
The winds at night had made a rout ; 



''THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 89 

And scattered many a lusty splinter 
And many a rotten bough about, 
Yet never had she, well or sick, 
As every man who knew her says, 
A pile beforehand, turf or stick, 
Enough to warm her for three days. 

Now, when the frost was past enduring, 
And made her poor old bones to ache, 
Could anything be more alluring 
Than an old hedge to Goody Blake ? 
And, now and then, it must be said. 
When her old bones were cold and chill, 
She left her fire, or left her bed. 
To seek the hedge of Harry Gill." 

Here there is unmistakable and undeniable charm, and it is 
the charm of humour. 

As for The Idiot Boy, about which a great many foolish things 
have been said, it is really as humorous as John Gilpin, and 
seems to stand as little in need of apology. The intrinsic 
dignity of the two situations seems about equal ; and if the 
fun of The Idiot Boy is less apparent and less rollicking than 
that of John Gilpin, its atmosphere and local colouring are 
more poetic, and it counts for much as a rendering of life and 
landscape. It is one of Wordsworth's most inspired and inevi- 
table poems ; it is built on a hearsay phrase, and it was poured 
forth extemporaneously as the poet walked in the Alfoxden 
groves. There may be too much of it ; but if it is not true and 
delightful poetry, one knows not where true and delightful 
poetry is to be found. 

It is the same with Peter Bell, only the charm is deeper. It 
is the charm (the paradox must be repeated) of humour ; it is 
the charm (another paradox) of style. Style, like humour, is 
one of the qualities the possession of which is most often denied 
to Wordsworth. It is indeed true that his style was uncertain 
and variable, as his sense of humour was inconstant. But the 
Alfoxden poetry as a whole is no exception to the law that 
good verse is never written in a bad style — in other words, that 
one can hardly in the criticism of poetry separate the thought 
from the expression. Wordsworth's power at its strongest is 
demonstrably a power of verbal distinction, a power of phrase, 
a power of noble rhythm. This is made abundantly clear in 
Lyrical Ballads and in Peter Bell. 



90 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



1 



The connection of Coleridge and Wordsworth with the 
Ouantock country carried within it the cause of its own disso- 
lution. The poets had been drawn thither largely by revolu- 
tionary sympathies, and for revolutionary sympathies they were 
to be driven from it. By 1798 both Coleridge and Wordsworth 
had moved far from the ideals of any section of revolutionists in 
England or France. But the orthodox conservatism of Somerset 
took no heed of fine distinctions ; even Thomas Poole had been 
suspect ; and the queer Wordsworth in particular, living, with 
his wild-eyed sister, in a place so much too big for them and 
their means, wandering and muttering, and not afraid of con- 
sorting with John Thelwall himself, was it desirable that he 
should continue to have Alfoxden on such easy terms ; nay, 
was it altogether safe to let him go about unwatched ? The 
St. Albyn family began to have qualms. There seems in- 
contestable authority for stating that a spy was sent down by 
government to look after the poets ; and Southey told his 
brother, seven years later, that "The fellow, after trying to 
tempt the country people to tell lies, could collect nothing more 
than that the gentlemen used to walk a good deal upon the 
coast, and that they were what they called poets. He got 
drunk at the inn, and told his whole errand and history." 

Wordsworth was blissfully unconscious of the espionage, and 
stoutly maintained that nobody annoyed him or made difficul- 
ties about his staying on at Alfoxden. But his memory must 
have played him false, or he must have been " blissfully havened " 
from the facts. As early as September, 1797, Tom Poole, 
taking full responsibility for introducing Wordsworth as a tenant, 
wrote to Mrs. St. Albyn with the view of reassuring her as to 
his respectability. He believed him " to be in every respect a 
gentleman." He referred to his uncle. Canon Cookson of 
Windsor, as in himself a sufficient warranty. "But I am 
informed," Poole proceeded, " you have heard that Mr. W. does 
keep company, and on this head I fear the most infamous false- 
hoods have reached your ears. Mr. W. is a man fond of retire- 
ment — fond of reading and writing — and has never had above 
two gentlemen at a time with him." John Thelwall had come 
to see Coleridge one day, and had turned up unexpectedly at 
Alfoxden. Could ordinary hospitality have been refused him ? 
And would not anybody wish to see so interesting a man as 




DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 

IIY W. CKUWBENT 



"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 91 

Thelwall ? " Be assured, and I speak it from my own know- 
ledge, that Mr. W., of all men alive, is the last who will give 
any one cause to complain of his opinions, his conduct, or his 
disturbing the peace of any one." 

In spite of all, the happy spring and early summer days 
were spent in the knowledge that the Wordsworths were going 
in a few months. In March, Wordsworth wrote to a friend, 
saying that they were "obliged" to quit at midsummer, and 
announcing a " delightful scheme " of going with the Coleridges 
to Germany for a time. And so it came about. The Words- 
worths left Alfoxden on June 26, 1798 ; they lingered in various 
places (one of them being Bristol, to superintend the printing of 
Lyrical Ballads), and in September they set sail with Coleridge 
for Hamburg. 

One poem in Lyrical Ballads, the last and greatest in the 
volume, perhaps the most characteristic breathing of the most 
characteristic Wordsworth spirit, was made after the Quantocks 
had been left for ever.* It would be tedious to transcribe it, and 
profane to mutilate it. It must be read as a whole, and pondered 
until it is known and loved by heart. The brother and sister 
stayed with Coleridge for a week at Nether Stowey ; then they 
went to the Wye. Wordsworth had been there five years before ; 
the whole region, and especially Tintern Abbey, was for him 
alive with pensive reminiscence, and prophetic of deep spiritual 
change. As he stood there on that July day of 1798, he felt 
within him the drama of his soul ; the boyhood of animal enjoy- 
ment ; the youth of rapture in the sights and sounds of Nature ; 
the jarring shock of humanity ; the restoration of faith and love ; 
the unspeakable sense of God. And to the great drama was 
added a wonderful epilogue, where the brother, finding himself 
in the sister, dedicates her to his own glorious fate. 

* Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey. 



CHAPTER V 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 

OF the many eminent men who knew Wordsworth, or were 
in any way associated with him, it is perhaps hardest 
to define accurately the place of Sou they in the Words worthian 
circle. He was in it, yet not of it, just as he is, and yet is not, a 
classic of English literature. No great English writer calls more 
urgently for reconsideration than Southey. He is hardly read 
nowadays ; to few is he much more than a name ; yet he filled 
a large space in his time ; no man ever worked harder or, in a 
sense, more successfully ; he stands out as typical, both of his 
own age and of the purely and overwhelmingly literary tem- 
perament. There is about him and his career something un- 
explained, a touch of paradox, a trace of the injustice of fame, 
which makes him interesting. 

If Southey was not quite in Wordsworth's circle, it was not 
for want of excellent opportunities, and it was in spite of near 
neighbourhood. Wordsworth settled at Grasmere in 1799, and 
Southey went to Greta Hall, close to Keswick, in 1803 ; from 
that year until the cold March day in 1843, when the aged Words- 
worth came over the hills to his friend's burial in Crosthwaite 
churchyard, the two poets, the most home-keeping of men, 
lived not more than fifteen miles from one another. Southey 
was only four years Wordsworth's junior ; they were bound 
together by their common interest in the Coleridges (Southey 
and Coleridge, we must not forget, married sisters) ; they began 
as revolutionary idealists, and they became — moving at much 
the same pace — unbending, alarmist, Church-and-State con- 
servatives ; they were, by design and devotion, poets — poets 
daring, original, independent, romantic ; they felt for one 
another sincere admiration ; no personal disagreement ever 

92 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 93 

arose to cloud their relationship. Yet they somehow belong 
to different worlds, and their separateness cannot be wholly 
explained by Wordsworth's unapproachable elevation. Words- 
worth, as we have seen, was not closely akin to any of his 
compeers ; but Southey was much less akin to him than 
Coleridge or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, much less akin 
to him than Walter Scott He was even less akin to him 
than those younger romantic poets, on whom Wordsworth 
looked with so cold a regard, than Shelley and Keats. In 
spite of his brilliant and versatile gifts, in spite of his being 
so excellent a poet and so admirably skilled in all literary 
craftsmanship, Southey perhaps never entered Wordsworth's 
real world at any point. Yet it is none the less interesting to 
study the relationships of the two men, their attractions and 
their repulsions. 

The criticism under whose lash they both winced, the 
criticism whose discipline fashioned the Romantic Revival, put 
them unhesitatingly into the same class. In the judgment of 
Jeffrey and those like-minded with him, Southey, with Words- 
worth and Coleridge, made up a sect, the sect to be known as 
the " Lake School." Reviewing Thalaba, the Edi7ibnrgh said : 
" The author . . . belongs to a sect of poets, that has 
established itself in this country within these ten or twelve 
years, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief 
champions and apostles." At best, this statement is only 
very partially true. In so far as there was any sectarian pact 
at all, it was made between Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 
west country fin 1797-8, when Lyrical Ballads came into being ; 
and we know to what a very small extent, after all, even 
Lyrical Ballads was a party-manifesto. Between 1795 and 1803 
Southey was working on wholly independent lines, and far from 
the theories to be unfolded in Wordsworth's Prefaces and in 
Biographia Literaria. He made two journeys to Portugal, 
which had a decisive influence on his genius, giving colour to 
his fancy, disposing him to Spanish and Portuguese learning, 
and opening a rich and unworked vein to his wonderful 
literary industry. He was producing poetry during those 
years, more assiduously and abundantly than Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, and with quite as much enthusiasm, though with 
different inspiration. Four practical enterprises belong to that 



94. WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

time : a long epic called Joan of Arc ; a mass of short miscel- 
laneous ballads, metrical tales and eclogues ; the romantic 
narrative poem called Thalaba the Destroyer, published in 
1801 ; and the equally romantic Madoc, written before Thalaba, 
though not published until 1805. Through Joan of Arc, con- 
ceived and partly written while Southey was still a Balliol 
undergraduate, at the time, that is, when he was closely 
associated with Coleridge, he came nearest, perhaps, to enrol- 
ment in the new brotherhood of song. Coleridge was not only 
deeply interested in the venture, but himself contributed to 
its pages a long insertion in the second book, afterwards with- 
drawn, and republished as The Destiny of Nations. Charles 
Lamb, who, if the world had not appropriated him, might be 
claimed as the great critic among the brotherhood, hailed 
Southey's first epic with a shout which we can still hear. 
Writing to Coleridge in the summer of 1796 he says, " With 
Joan of Arc \ have been delighted, amazed. . . . Why, the 
poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we 
live in from the imputation of degenerating in Poetry, were 
there no such beings extant as Burns [it was a month before 

Burns's death] and Bowles, Cowper, and ; fill up the blank 

how you please; I say nothing. . . . On the whole, I expect 
Southey one day to rival Milton : I already deem him equal to 
Cowper, and superior to all living poets besides." If we ignore 
chronology, and reflect on where Southey stands now in the 
temple of fame, we shall be disposed to find a sly jest in the 
last sentence. But there is no jest about it ; there were no 
Lyrical Ballads as yet, no Ancient Mariner, and no Chris tabel, 
and Lamb meant every word he said. And indeed Joan made 
an epoch ; it is a spirited narrative poem, of almost epic 
dimensions — really the first serious epic since Paradise Regained ; 
on a noble theme and written in correct and spirited blank 
verse. How could even Charles Lamb know just what was 
going to happen, and how the currents were to set ? 

Southey's preface to Joan of Arc shows all the brisk self- 
consciousness of the innovator or restorer. Not less interesting 
in their promise and animation were some of the shorter poems 
which he was composing while Wordsworth and Coleridge were 
busy in the Quantocks. These show a clear, but distant, 
cousinly relationship to the Lyrical Ballads and their like. 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 95 

First, there are the ballads, of some of which, and especially of 
The Battle of Blenheim and Mary, the Maid of the Inn, one is 
tired of hearing that they are the only things of Southey's that 
live. They are, indeed, excellent specimens of the balladist's 
art, rapid and interesting in narrative movement, clear in mean- 
ing, fascinating in metre, touched here and there with true 
pathos, true horror, and true humour. Many of them, e.g. The 
Old Woman of Berkeley, are, of course, artificial, they are imita- 
tions of an old form, rather than like the Ancient Mariner or 
Christabel, new creations in a restored form. None of them is 
imaginative in the sense in which Coleridge and Wordsworth 
intended to be imaginative in their joint endeavours. Yet their 
simplicity, their lucidity, their vivacity, their first-rate style 
make them worthy instances of Romanticism, in so far as 
Romanticism means the restoration to poetry of spontaneity, of 
simplicity, of " natural " as opposed to " poetic " diction. 

One section of Southey's miscellaneous poems, the English 
Eclogues, stand in a class by themselves. They are an experi- 
ment, deliberately and self-consciously made, in imitation of 
German models, and in a form which Southey believed to be 
without precedent in English. They are a contribution to 
pastoral poetry in the widest sense of that comprehensive term 
— poetry, that is, like the Bucolics of Virgil, expressed in the 
ipsissima verba of simple folk talking among themselves about 
the simple concerns of a country neighbourhood. In these 
attempts of Southey's the cousinly likeness to Wordsworth- 
ianism is very marked. They are not very successful, for much 
the same reason, perhaps, that Wordsworth was not always 
successful ; simplicity is pursued at the expense, sometimes, of 
the dignity and beauty without which verse is not poetry. 

" When the Doctor sent him 
Abroad to try the air, it made me certain 
That all was over. There's but little hope, 
Methinks, that foreign parts can help a man 
When his own mother-country will not do." 

There is a great deal of this kind of thing in Southey's 
Eclogues. Yet Charles Lamb liked some of them " mightily," 
for their " pictures " and " realities." The last word, we feel, is 
well chosen. It is by their realism that they count ; and 
realism was one of the triumphs of the Romantic Revival. 



96 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

For high success in the pure lyric of self-revelation and 
self-relief, Southey had not enough tenderness, not enough 
humanity. Nor, though he was a master of expression in 
verse, and had a fine gift of phrasing, had he the unfailing 
taste and felicity which such poetry requires. Thus, in The 
Dead Friend, a lyric which just falls short of being beautiful, 
and yet has no throb of real pain, the same poet who writes — 

" Not to the grave, not to the grave, my soul, 
Follow thy friend beloved, 
The spirit is not there I " 

which is at least as good as Longfellow at his best, is capable of 

writing — 

" How sweet it were with powers 
Such as the Cherubim 
To view the depth of Heaven ! " 

which even Longfellow would hardly have allowed himself to 
put down. 

The Edinburgh Review, then, misconceived Southey when 
it made him the champion and apostle of the Lake School in 
so far as that school consisted of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
co-operating for the reform of English poetry. In 1809, Byron 
entered the field of the poetry and criticism of the Romantic 
Revival with his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Two 
years before he had published his juvenile Hours of Idleness, 
and had been soundly punished for it by the Edinburgh. 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was his rejoinder ; and a 
very interesting rejoinder it is. Throughout his clever satire, 
Byron, with the egotistic malevolence which always haunted 
him, runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. Himself a 
true product of Romanticism, he attacks the best phases of 
Romanticism with all Jeffrey's aversion and a thousand times 
Jeffrey's spite. First of all, Walter Scott, who yielded after- 
wards with such sweet grace to the glaringly popular Byron of 
Childe Harold, Scott, whose Lay of the Last Minstrel and 
Marmion will be read and loved, we may safely predict, long 
after the Giaour and Lara are forgotten, is consigned to limbo. 
This is how Byron treats the noble Marmion — 

" Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, 
The golden-crested haughty Marmion, 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 97 

Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight 
Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight, 
The gibbet or the field prepared to grace ; 
A mighty mixture of the great and base. 
Andthink'st thou, Scott ! by vain conceit perchance, 
On public taste to foist thy stale romance ? 



No ! when the sons of song descend to trade, 
Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade. 
Let such forgo the poet's sacred name, 
Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame ; 
Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain ! 
And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain ! 



For this we spurn Apollo's venal son, 
And bid a long ' good night to Marmion.' " 



Then comes Southey's turn. He is a " ballad-monger," who 
pours forth spurious epics, which claim to be on a level with 
the work of Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Tasso. Thalaba, as a 
hero, is the rival of Tom Thumb. Madoc is a tissue of 
travellers' tales. Byron deprecates the coming Curse of 
Kehama, m which Southey's poetic power culminated — 

" Oh ! Southey ! Southey ! cease thy varied song ! 
A bard may chant too often and too long : 
As thou art strong in verse, in mercy spare ! 
A fourth, alas ! were more than we could bear. 
But if, in spite of all the world can say, 
Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way ; 
If still in Berkeley ballads most uncivil. 
Thou wilt devote old women to the devil, 
The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue ; 
God help thee, Southey, and thy readers too." 

In 1 813, Southey was made Poet Laureate, his only rival 
being Scott, who, of course, worked for Southey rather than for 
himself. His success in this respect did not sweeten towards 
him the jealous soul of Byron. In 18 18, Byron dedicated to 
the Laureate the first instalment of Don Jtiaii. He still 
regarded Southey as a "Laker," and lumped him up with 
Coleridge and Wordsworth in the old uncritical way — 

" And now, my Epic Renegade ! what are ye at ? 
With all the Lakers, in and out of place ? 
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye 
Like four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pye." 
H 



98 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" You — Gentlemen ! by dint of long seclusion 
From better company, have kept your own 

At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion 
Of one another's minds, at last have grown 

To deem, as a most logical conclusion, 
That Poesy has wreaths for you alone ; 

There is a narrowness in such a notion, 

Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean." 

Coleridge knew better ; and he, at least, was a great critic, 
with no envy in his heart. In his Biographia Literavia he finds 
in their treatment of Southey one of the chief condemnations of 
the critics. He ridicules the notion that the Lakists were in 
any real sense a mutual admiration society. He shows that 
the critics condemned Southey by the easy process, before 
which no poetry could stand, of exhibiting its weaker sides 
only. " He who tells me that there are defects in a new work, 
tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted 
without his information. But he who points out and elucidates 
the beauties of an original work, does indeed give me interesting 
information, such as experience would not have authorized me 
in anticipating." The latter was by no means the method of 
Jeffrey and the rest. What should we have learned from them 
of "the pastoral claims and wild streaming lights of Thalaba," 
of the "full blaze of the Kehama (a gallery of finished pic- 
tures in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding, 
the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the 
colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery) ; " 
the " more sober beauties " of Madoc ; what of the Roderick, " in 
which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently 
inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language 
and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splen- 
dour of particular passages " ? Such is Coleridge's estimate ; 
in which it is impossible not to feel some of the generous over- 
praise of kindness. But he arrives at a general conclusion 
which twentieth-century readers of Southey will be slow to 
quarrel with. "His prose is always intelligible and always 
entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species 
of composition known before, and he has added new ones ; and 
if we except the highest lyric (in which how few, how very few 
even of the greatest minds have been fortunate), he has 
attempted every species successfully." 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 99 

Men of high intelligence in a later generation, men like 
Cardinal Newman and Dean Stanley, knew the worth of 
Southey's poetry ; and even Carlyle knew it, though he was 
wont to praise his verse-making contemporaries with a grudge. 
But it remained the correct thing to dispraise Southey. When 
Macaulay brought up his tremendous reinforcements to the 
EdinbiirgJi, he had occasion to review there Southey's Colloquies 
in 1830. Southey's Colloquies concern social and political 
matters; and in 1830 Southey was a tenacious and uncom- 
promising Tory, while Macaulay was alive with the Whiggism 
which was to carry the first Reform Bill. His quarrel with 
Southey is therefore only partly literary ; and, indeed, when he 
comes face to face with the characterization of his poetry, he 
has to mingle praise with blame and honour with contempt. 
*' His longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very 
extraordinary productions. We doubt greatly whether they 
will be read fifty years hence ; but that, if they are read, they 
will be admired, we have no doubt whatever." 

There are many points of resemblance between the literary 
careers of Southey and Walter Scott. Both men were prodigies 
of literary industry and miscellaneous literary ability. Both 
were laid hold of in youth by the fires of the Romantic move- 
ment ; both won their first reputation as brilliant poets ; both 
were Quarterly Reviewers ; both forsook poetry for prose. 
The differences between the men help us to understand 
Southey's comparative failure. So far as the mere manage- 
ment of prose, the mere general mechanism of expression, is 
concerned, Southey was a much better writer than Scott. His 
English is much more terse, more nervous, more oligosyllabic, 
than Scott's. But this superiority, as we know, is but dust in 
the balance compared with Scott's achievement as a writer of 
fiction, by virtue of which he sits for ever in the front rank on a 
golden throne. "All is great in the Waverley Novels," said 
Goethe ; " material, effects, characters, execution ; " and in the 
sense of such greatness, the sense of Scott's deficiencies in style 
disappears, and we see how low is Southey's stature beside his. 
In poetry the disparity is less great. Both Southey and Scott 
are in a rank below the highest in nineteenth-century poetry \ 
this was maintained, much too emphatically, in their lifetime ; 
it is amply recognized still. Both were narrative poets ; both 

LOFa 



100 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

were successful balladists ; both were poets of romantic incident. 
In many respects Scott's poetry is inferior to Southey's : it 
shows less metrical and stylistic resource ; it is much less 
learned, less complex, less artistic. Yet for those very reasons 
it was more popular when it appeared, and for those reasons it 
still lives, while Southey's needs to be revived. Its life lies in 
its spontaneity, its simplicity, its gush and flow, its reliance on 
the essential, and sempiternal interest of romance. In a word 
it is human and natural poetry, while Southey's is, to a large 
extent, preterhuman and artificial. 

And indeed the deficiency of Southey's poetry was also a 
deficiency of his personality — a deficiency in the human and 
natural. Through excellent portraits and ample autobiographical 
and biographical evidence, we can reach that personality, and 
get to pretty close quarters with it. Let us try to do so now. 

A tall spare man, with dark complexion, dark curling hair, 
and the hazel eyes which so often go with that colouring, is, by 
general consent, the Southey of authentic portraits and con- 
temporary descriptions. A bold fine face it must have been, 
striking rather than winning, with strongly pencilled eyebrows, 
aquiline nose, and full lips, the eyes keen, not sweet, and the 
head habitually carried high, with the chin forwards. It would 
be difficult to imagine a physiognomy more unlike that of his 
house-mate, Coleridge, with his " heaven-eyes " and flabby 
irresoluteness of mien. Southey's manner seems to have im- 
pressed observers by its combination of agreeableness and 
reserve. Two acute critics and picturesque describers of person- 
ality, De Quincey and Carlyle, have transmitted their im- 
pressions. De Quincey first saw him at Greta Hall, in 1807, 
when Southey had not been many years settled there, and was 
thirty-three, De Quincey, like all men and women who wield 
picturesque pens, was apt to detract, even in describing his 
heroes ; but he does not write detractingly of Southey. The 
carriage of his head suggested to De Quincey that he con- 
templated abstractions, and was an aspiring man. There was 
" a serene and gentle pride " in his face, chastened by manifest 
modesty and reverence. His bearing was courteous ; and yet he 
was hardly genial. " The point in which Southey's manner failed 
the most in conciliating regard, was, perhaps, in what related to 
the external expressions of friendliness. . . . There was an air 




ROBERT SOUTH EV IN 1798 

FROM THE DRAWING BY HANCOCK IN THE NATIONAL I'ORTRAIT GALLERY 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 101 

of distance and reserve about him — the reserve of a lofty, self- 
respecting mind, but, perhaps, a little too freezing, in his treat- 
ment of all persons who were not amongst the corps of his 
ancient fireside friends." Nothing in later and frequent inter- 
course changed De Quincey's first impression of Southey. 
There remained the sense of his amiability and serenity ; of his 
rectitude, of his courtesy in speech, and gentleness in judgment ; 
and there remained also the sense of chilling reserve. There 
remained, above all, the sense of his extraordinary bookishness^ 
his literary industry and literary preoccupation. Although De 
Quincey, in personal intercourse, thought him, in some respects, 
Wordsworth's moral superior, less monopolizing in conversation, 
less self-complacent and intolerant, more charitable, considerate, 
and chivalrous, he felt that the bookishness of his interests and 
talk made him a less comfortable companion. His library, De 
Quincey alleged, was his wife, his true love which had his heart. 
Besides, he was not so expansive a talker as Wordsworth ; he 
was more epigrammatic, more aphoristic, and therefore apt to 
make his interlocutor often feel that the conversational account 
was closed. 

Carlyle's record of Southey is more interesting than De 
Quincey's. His praise is quite as cordial ; and somewhat rare 
was Carlyle's cordial praise of a contemporary, especially a 
contemporary man of letters. His gift for character-sketching 
was greater and more fascinating than De Quincey's. De 
Quincey, too, as himself a Lakist, might be expected to be 
hampered, in writing about a Lake poet, by some of the 
trammels of artificial brotherhood. But Carlyle's representa- 
tions in this matter, were wholly " without prejudice," except 
that it was his cue to belittle all versifiers of his own day. 

Carlyle first encountered Southey in the early days of his 
London life in the thirties, before and after his French Revohc- 
Hon came out, when Southey was in his sixties, and nearing the 
end of the journey. The two men met at the house of Henry 
Taylor, author of Philip Van Artevelde, that noble link between 
two generations of English letters. Carlyle was doubly interested 
in Southey. As a young Radical, he had sympathized in the 
outcry against the poet as a renegade from his early republican 
principles. Later, when that phase of opinion had passed away 
for ever, Carlyle got to know Southey's poetry, and to think of 



102 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

it with the admiration it deserves. " I much recognize," wrote 
Carlyle in his delightful idiom, "the piety, the gentle deep 
affection, the reverence for God and man, which reigned in these 
pieces : full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, and yet 
with a clang of chivalrous valour finely audible too." Carlyle 
went to Henry Taylor's in the evening, when he and Southey 
had finished a tete-d,-tete dinner, and were taking their wine in a 
ground-floor room " somewhere near Downing Street, and look- 
ing into St. James's Park." " Southey was a man towards well 
up in the fifties [he must have been really over sixty] ; hair grey, 
not yet hoary, well setting off his fine clear brown complexion ; 
head and face both smallish, as indeed the figure was while 
seated ; features finely cut ; eyes, brow, mouth good in their 
kind — expressive all, and even vehemently so, but betokening 
rather keenness than depth either of intellect or character; a 
serious, human, honest, but sharp almost fierce-looking thin 
man, with very much of the militant in his aspect, — in the eyes 
especially was visible a mixture of sorrow and of anger, or of 
angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the world had not 
yet ended in victory, but also never should \sic\ in defeat." In 
the course of this first conversation Southey quoted Praed — a 
fact which Carlyle (whom Praed had not the good fortune to 
please) thought ** tragic." When Southey rose from his chair, 
Carlyle first realized that he was tall. He was "all legs, in 
shape and stature like a pair of tongs." Subsequent meetings 
and conversations made Carlyle like Southey more and more ; 
and he was especially gratified by his unexpected approval of 
his French Revolution. In those later talks Carlyle noticed 
Southey's careworn anxious look, and how his eyes " were as 
if filled with gloomy bewilderment and incurable sorrows." Once 
he called on Carlyle at Cheyne Row — Miss Isabella Fenwick 
(of whom we shall hear later as a friend of Wordsworth), a con- 
nection of Sir Henry Taylor, and very fond of men of letters, 
coming with him. It was an unfortunate moment for a digni- 
fied visit ; Mrs. Carlyle was marmalade-making over the parlour 
fire, which was " brisker " than that in the kitchen, when suddenly 
the big brass pan boiled over, and the chimney caught fire in 
the blaze. We can fancy the scene : Mrs. Carlyle heroically 
snatching the pan off the fire, and Carlyle himself, hastily sum- 
moned from his writing-table, "letting down the grate valve. 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 103 

and cutting quite off the supply of oxygen or atmosphere," 
when there sounded, with a voice of thunder, Southey's and 
Miss Fenwick's knock at the street door ! Carlyle remembered 
" how daintily " his wife " made the salutations, brief quizzical 
bit of explanation, got the wreck to vanish ; and sat down as 
member of our little party." The two men talked of Shelley, 
with a great deal of admirable morality at his expense, but 
apparently concurring in a total lack of insight into his intellec- 
tual and literary worth. 

One final interview there was, iete-d-tete in the evening, at 
Henry Taylor's. They sat on a sofa, and bewailed the strides 
of democracy, persuading themselves apparently that they — the 
sombre, conventional Tory and the paradoxical, hero-worship- 
ping humorist, Radical, essentially, in every fibre — had the same 
point of view. Then they exchanged their last farewell. 

It is impossible to resist quoting almost verbatim Carlyle's 
summing-up of Southey : " I used to construe him to myself as 
a man of slight build, but of sound and elegant ; with consider- 
able genius in him, considerable faculty of speech and rhythmic 
insight, and with a morality that shone distinguished among his 
contemporaries." Carlyle had noticed how the colour came and 
went on Southey's dark face. " I reckoned him (with those 
blue blushes and those red) to be the perhaps excitablest of all 
men ; and that a deep mute monition of conscience had spoken 
to him, * You are capable of running mad, if you don't take 
care. Acquire habitudes ; stick firm as adamant to them at all 
times, and work, continually work 1 ' This, for thirty or forty 
years, he had punctually and impetuously done ; no man so 
habitual, we were told ; gave up his poetry at a given hour, on 
stroke of the clock, and took to prose, etc., etc. ; and, as to 
diligence and velocity, employed his very walking hours, walked 
with a book in his hand ; and by these methods of his, had got 
through perhaps a greater amount of work, counting quantity 
and quality, than any other man whatever in those years of his ; 
till all suddenly ended. I likened him to one of those huge 
sandstone grinding cylinders which I had seen at Manchester, 
turning with inconceivable velocity. . . . screaming harshly, and 
shooting out each of them its sheet of fire . . . beautiful sheets 
of fire . . . when you look from rearward. For many years 
these stones grind so, at such a rate, till at last (in some cases) 



104 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

comes a moment when the stone's cohesion is quite worn out, 
overcome by the stupendous velocity long continued ; and while 
grinding its fastest, it flies off altogether, and settles some yards 
from you, a grinding-stone no longer, but a cartload of quiet sand." 
There can be no doubt that much in this bright sketch is 
true to the real Southey, and it is in full agreement with the 
lazy traditional second or third hand estimate of him. Yet it 
does not satisfy the inquirer. The mere regularity, for example ; 
why should it always be quoted as being vaguely to Southey's 
discredit ? There is, after all, no demerit in stopping one's work 
when the clock strikes, even if the work should chance to be 
poetry. It is not self-evident that poetry ought to be composed 
in a trance or amid chaos. The implication, of course, is that 
Southey's output was inferior ; that the incessant grinding, 
the monotonous regularity, produced nothing equivalent to the 
effort. But inferiority is relative ; it was not easy to be the 
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. There is always 
some absurdity in being Poet Laureate when other men are 
producing immeasurably better poetry than you are yourself. 
But it is nothing to posterity that Southey happened to be 
Laureate ; what posterity wants is to ascertain his absolute 
rank. 

Carlyle's version of Southey's industry, at all events, is true. 
Southey's characteristic life and life-work began with his 
settlement at Greta Hall in 1803, when he was thirty. It 
was just nine years since the romantic revolutionary had made 
Coleridge's acquaintance at Oxford ; just eight since he and 
Coleridge had married respectively Edith and Sarah Fricker 
at Bristol. His youth was over ; his intellectual wild oats 
were sown ; Portugal and things Portuguese and Spanish had 
made their mark on him ; he was apart, he was dedicated, 
pledged, to the literary life, pure and simple. Therefore, when 
Coleridge, who had made Greta Hall at least his wife's home, 
asked the Southeys to come and share the quiet mansion on 
its knoll under Skiddaw, and in sound of Greta and Derwent, 
Southey felt that the call must be obeyed. It was indeed a 
potent call ! For, once settled at Greta Hall, Southey never 
left it until he was carried, forty years after, to his grave in 
Crosthwaite churchyard, hardly a mile off. 

Those were the forty years of the industry which has 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 105 

become a proverb. ** Imagine me," he wrote once, "in this 
great study of mine from breakfast till dinner, from dinner 
till tea, and from tea till supper, in my old black coat, my 
corduroys alternately with the long worsted pantaloons and 
gaiters in one, and the green shade, and sitting at my desk, 
and you have my picture and my history." It was never 
different. All that has to be added is the leisurely walk in 
fine weather, book in hand, always with full enjoyment of the 
scenery. "I have seen a sight," he wrote in February, 1804, 
"more dreamy and wonderful than fancy ever yet devised for 
fairyland. We had walked down to the lake side ; it was a 
delightful day, the sun shining, and a few white clouds hanging 
motionless in the sky. . . . The surface of the lake was so 
perfectly still, that it became one great mirror and all its 
waters disappeared. . . . As I stood on the shore, heaven 
and the clouds seemed lying under me ; I was looking down 
into the sky ... it seemed like an abyss of sky before me, 
not fog and clouds from a mountain, but the blue heaven 
spotted with a few fleecy pillows of cloud, that looked placed 
there for angels to rest upon them." In such things Southey 
took daily delight. 

If Southey's library was his wife ; though he loved books 
with such devotion that when, before the end, the power of 
reading forsook him, he would take down his volumes from 
the shelves and kiss them, we must not forget that he was 
a domestic man in the fullest sense of the word. He was twice 
married ; he had children of his own, through whom he had 
keen happiness and keen pain ; and the Coleridges, Hartley, 
Derwent, and Sara, spent their childhood and youth at Greta 
Hall. Southey's letters, not letters of genius like Charles 
Lamb's, and without the delicate flavour and odour of Cowper's, 
show, with a perfect transparency, the depths of a life as happy 
in its play as it was strenuous in its industry, and faultless in 
its regularity. Southey's humour was hardly so abundant as 
to overflow into his writings ; but it was genuine enough to 
make his home a happy place for his children, and even for 
himself. Southey was not a constitutionally happy man. Carlyle 
noticed the sorrow and anger in his eyes, and the shiftings of 
colour on his face even on the threshold of old age ; and he 
shrewdly reckoned that behind and beneath the chill reserve 



106 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

of manner, perilously unstable nerves were on the tremble. 
Throughout his life Southey suffered the drawbacks of a neurotic- 
temperament. In his youth he had dreams, unfed with anyf 
opium, which were almost worthy to rank with De Quincey's ; 
and which help to explain the unearthly scenery and metrical 
excitements of Thalaba. He had an ever recurring fight with 
"hay-fever," and other indications of nervous weakness. Yet 
in his incessant toil and cheerful family-life, set in the midst 
of scenery so exquisite, he found such happiness as his nature 
could feel. At fifty-one he could say, "my literary employ- 
ments have never, in the slightest degree, injured my health." 
He denied that he had ever been a close student, in any 
unwholesome sense of the words. There was nothing irksome 
or anxious in his work, carried on as it was so far from the 
central machinery ; he was master, he said, of his time and of 
himself. If the daily walk was ever intermitted it was not from 
indisposition for exercise, and it was very seldom. He loved 
it ; and in winter would often take it with some of his young 
folks before breakfast, " for the sake of getting the first sunshine 
on the mountains." His mild humour found an outlet in a 
love of cats and kittens. In his sixtieth year he could write 
to a contemporary : " Alas, Grosvenor, this day poor old 
Rumpel was found dead, after as long and happy a life as cat 
could wish for, if cats form wishes on that subject. His full 
titles were : — * The Most Noble the Archduke Rumpelstiltzchen, 
Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waowhler, and Skaratch.' 
There should be a court mourning in Catland. ... As we have 
no catacombs here, he is to be decently interred in the orchard; 
and cat-mint planted on his grave." 

Southey had to bear the anguish of losing two children, 
a son and daughter, and of having to put away his first wife, as 
a mental invalid, from his home. Long before those things 
happened, he felt the sombreness of advancing life. At forty 
he was talking like an old man, about the sere and yellow leaf, 
and the decline of his poetic powers. Yet we cannot avoid the 
conclusion that he was predominantly happy. " When I cease 
to be cheerful," he said of himself when he was thirty -two, " it 
is only to become contemplative, to feel at times a wish that I 
was in that state of existence which passes not away ; and this 
always ends in a new impulse to proceed." 



1 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 107 

Those who think about Southey at all seem to have made 
up their minds that he was more eminent as a prose-writer 
than as a poet. Yet this judgment apparently rests on little 
besides the fact that his excellent lives of Nelson and Wesley are 
well written, still readable, and often reprinted ; while his 
poetry, except one or two ballads and lyrics, is hardly known. 
As a matter of fact, however, the great bulk of Southey's prose 
— the main product of those years of portentous industry, — 
lies in a darker limbo than that which hides his verse. It falls 
into three classes, with each of which time has dealt unkindly. 
In the first are the laborious histories, the History of Brazil 2^\d 
the History of the Peninsular War, which are entirely forgotten. 
The History of Portitgal, which was to be exhaustive and 
epoch-making, was never finished. In the second class are the 
innumerable contributions to the Quarterly Revieiv and other 
periodicals ; reviews literary, political, ecclesiastical, economic ; 
articles of admirable learning, excellent judgment, faultless 
morals, and unbending conservatism, which have no message 
for posterity. Into the third class fall Southey's chief efforts at 
imaginative and humorous prose, the Colloqtiies on Society, and 
that interminable farrago, The Doctor. The former, one may 
predict, will be remembered as long as Macaulay's essays are 
read, and no longer. The Doctor is dead for want of humour, 
where humour alone could preserve life. 

After all, then, it would seem that it is by his poetry that 
Southey must live if he is to live at all. There is, sometimes, 
a possible resurrection for poetry, when there is none for 
prose. Can Southey's rise again } 

That the chief part of it — those poems to the making of which 
there went so much pathetic devotion, so much genuine inspira- 
tion, — has the look of death, there is no doubt. And no wonder ! 
For, in the first place, they are narrative poems, and very long ; 
and for such poetry the chance of immortality is very precarious. 
If narrative poetry attains to epic rank, if it is poetry like the 
JEneid, Paradise Lost, even The Faerie Qneene, its immortality 
will depend on its workmanship : the dignity, the interest, of its 
themes, is not likely ever to suffer loss. But where epic rank is 
wanting, where the narrative lacks the religious or historico- 
traditional basis of true epic, where it depends for its interest 
on purely human incident and character, varied, perhaps, by 



108 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

some preternatural by-play, or recommended by great novelty 
of subject, the chance of life is much more doubtful. And the 
doubt increases with the length of the poem. Length is in 
itself a drawback, a stumbling-block, even to the keen lover of 
poetry, much more to the average reader of it. And this for a 
profound reason. Poetry cannot be enjoyed as it ought to be 
enjoyed, any more than it can be made, without excitement ; 
and excitement, if it is to be pleasurable and beneficial, must 
not be unduly protracted. It is the difficulty in narrative 
poetry of maintaining emotion at the pitch necessary for poetic 
success, whether for the poet or his reader, which explains the 
small proportion of extended narrative poetry to be found 
among classics that are loved. The lyric with its inevitableness, 
its brevity ; the drama, with its intensity and its conventional 
limitations, are the more natural vehicles of inspiration, the 
surer messengers between heart and heart. 

True, narrative poetry never had a better opportunity than 
in the days of the Romantic Revival, and especially before 
1 8 14, when the Waverley Novels began to be poured forth. 
The imaginative sympathies of the public were astir, and there 
was as yet no wealth of prose fiction to gratify them. The 
taste for didactic and argumentative poetry had died away. 
There was an opening for narrative poetry, for fiction in verse ; 
and poetry of that kind, admirable and dazzlingly popular 
poetry, was produced abundantly. The popularity of Scott's 
poetry in this kind was only eclipsed by the popularity of 
Byron's. Readers who would now spend hours over novels, 
spent hours over Marmion, Lara, and The Bride of Abydos. 

Neither Scott nor Byron is dead ; but Byron's purely 
narrative poetry has but a faint pulse ; and Scott, as a poet, is 
far from being to us what he was to our forefathers. Still, The 
Lady of the Lake and Marmion will always, we may believe, 
find delighted readers, because of Scott's admirable mastery of 
the metres he used, and because of the deep roots struck by 
those poems into national scenery and life. They are not far 
from the epic place. 

Southey had definite aims in poetry, and he aimed with 
intelligence and skill. He made his plans in his revolutionary 
boyhood, in entire freedom from " classical " tradition. Romantic 
medisevalism laid hold of him ; his most juvenile ambition was 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 109 

to complete the Faerie Qiieene. His lyrical and idyllic and 
balladist's efforts were episodic and occasional ; he meant to be 
an epic poet, and he succeeded in being at least a narrative one. 
For him poetry was to be no recreation from the labours of 
learning, no water of Lethe in which the student might forget 
himself. On the contrary, it was to be one aspect of the most 
recondite learning ; he was to make a series of epics on the great 
mythologies of the world. Such was the ideal : the realization 
is in Thalaha and The Curse of Kehama. Southey modestly 
repudiated all comparison with Milton ; but he quite soberly 
ranked himself with Tasso, with Virgil, with Homer. Yet, 
with such grandiose conceptions and ambitious self-judgment, 
he had a keen sense, born of the new criticism, of the in- 
admissibility, in the best poetry, of grandiosity in expression ; 
of pompous diction, rhetoric, elaborate ornamentation. The 
heroic in poetry meant, in Southey's estimation, no abnegation 
of spontaneity, simplicity, and passion. " That poetry," he said 
once (and he was speaking of heroic narrative), " which would 
reach the heart, must go straight to the mark like an arrow. 
Away with all trickery and ornaments when pure beauty is to 
be represented . . . away with drapery when you would display 
muscular strength." " I am a Puritan in language," he asserted 
when he was writing Madoc. He would not luxuriate in 
archaisms ; learned as he was, he kept the impulse to neologize 
sternly in check. Yet he had the true romantic belief in novelty 
as essential to poetic success. 

Southey's method of attaining novelty was twofold : by 
strangeness of theme on the one hand, and careful metrical 
skill on the other. Only in Thalaha and Kehama, where the 
twofold method is fully employed, does Southey realize himself 
as a poet. His long blank verse poems, Madoc, Roderick, and 
others, were much admired by his contemporaries ; they are 
still readable when the reader has a great deal of leisure, and 
has nothing else to read. But the curse of mere narrative 
poetry is on them, and they are too undistinguished to be 
everlasting. It is by the combination, in Thalaba and Kehama, 
of sheer cutlandishness of theme with lucid refined expression 
and fascinating metrical movement, that Southey lives and 
deserves to live. Both parts of the combination are essential. 
Without the distinction of style the strangeness of theme would 



110 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

have been a fatal stumbling-block ; to popularity it was a 
hindrance even as it was. Readers could stand the picturesque 
orientalism of Byron and Moore, but the learned orientalism of 
Southey was too strong for them. Charles Lamb gave voice 
to a great deal of contemporary criticism when he wrote as he 
did of Kehama. " My imagination goes sinking and floundering 
in the vast spaces of unopened-before systems and faiths ; I am 
put out of the pale of my old sympathies ; my moral sense is 
almost outraged .... Jove, and his brotherhood of gods, 
tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul's 
hopes are not struck at in such contests ; but your Oriental 
almighties are too much types of the intangible prototype to be 
meddled with without shuddering." Yet what attractiveness 
there is in the scenery, and in the beings, human and preter- 
human, that flit across it ! How in Thalaha we are soothed by 
the vast desert solitudes ; how in Kehama we breathe the 
heavy sweet air of Hindostan ! 

But it is true that we could not stand much of either if we 
were not detained by the style. As to style in general, whether 
in prose or verse, Southey held what is the best practical 
conviction about it, namely, that one ought to express one's self 
as perspicuously, concisely, and impressively as possible, and 
otherwise think about the matter not at all. But about metres 
he thought very much, and in Thalaba and Kehama he attained 
to a diction which poets seldom achieve without much artistic 
self- consciousness. The rhymelessness of Thalaba (which 
Southey borrowed from the Norwich poet, Sayers), and its 
rhythmical originality are potent to overcome the drawbacks of 
its length and the abstruseness of its theme, to make it the 
interesting reading which it undoubtedly is. For the emphasis 
of rhyme Southey substitutes another emphasis, that of the 
repetition of phrase which every reader of Thalaba knows so 
well — 

" Who at this untimely hour 

Wanders o'er the desert sands ? 
No station is in view, 

Nor palm-grove, islanded amid the waste. 
The mother and her child, 

The widow'd mother and the fatherless boy, 
They at this tmtbnely hour 

Wander o'er the desert sands?'' 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 111 

The delicacy and careful simplicity of Southey's diction is 
very unlike the rhetorical tumidity of most second-rate poets — 

" But then the wrinkling smile 
Forsook Mohareb's cheek, 
And darker feelings settled on his brow. 
' Now by my soul,' quoth he, ' and I believe, 

Idiot ! that I have led 
Some camel-knee'd prayer-monger through the cave ! 
What brings thee hither ? Thou shouldst have a hut 
By some Saint's grave beside the public way, 
There to less-knowing fools 
Retail thy Koran-scraps, 
And in thy turn die civet-like at last, 
In the dung-perfume of thy sanctity ! '" 

Tennyson might have written the last four lines. 

The rapid narrative movement, the enchanting clearness of 
detail which we feel in The Ancient Mariner, are not wanting 
here — 

" All waste ! no sign of life 
But the track of the wolf and the bear ! 

No sound but the wild, wild wind, 
And the snow crunching under his feet ! 
Night is come ; neither moon nor stars, 

Only the light of the snow ! 
But behold a fire in the cave of the hill, 

A heart-reviving fire ; 
And thither with strength renew'd 

Thalaba presses on. 

He found a Woman in the cave, 

A solitary Woman, 
Who by the fire was spinning. 

And singing as she spun. 
The pine boughs were cheerfully blazing. 
And her face was bright with the flame ; 
Her face was as a Damsel's face. 

And yet her hair was grey. 
She bade him welcome with a smile, 

And still continued spinning, 
And singing as she spun. 

The thread she spun it gleam'd like gold 
In the light of the odorous fire, 
Yet was it so wondrously thin, 
That, save when it shone in the light, 
You might look for it closely in vain. 



112 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

The youth sate watching it, 
And she observed his wonder, 

And then again she spake, 

And still her speech was song ; 
Now twine it round thy hands I say, 
Now twine it round thy hands I pray ! 
My thread is small, my thread is fine, 
But he must be 
A stronger than thee 
Who can break this thread of mine ! " 

Nor, in the phantasmagoria of the preternatural, is the 
natural thrill never felt. Even the magic "Green Bird of 
Paradise " falls short of the magic that is abroad in an English 
spring — 

" Her voice was soft and sweet, 
It rose not with the blackbird's thrill, 
Nor warbled like that dearest bird that holds 

The solitary man 
A loiterer in his thoughtful walk at eve." 

Nothing, certainly, but clarity of style and metrical resource 
could make the reader feel at home among the outlandish com- 
plications of Kehama. And yet those gifts are so conspicuous, 
and the narrative is made so beguiling by its constant breaks, 
that the reader who begins the poem fairly will hardly wish to 
stop before he has finished it. If the human interest is slight, 
the adventures are most winningly described — 

*' Behold them wandering on their hopeless way. 

Unknowing where they stray, 
Yet sure where'er they stop to find no rest. 

The evening gale is blowing, 

It plays among the trees ; 
Like plumes upon a warrior's crest, 
They see yon cocos tossing to the breeze. 
Ladurlad views them with impatient mind, 

Impatiently he hears 

The gale of evening blowing. 
The sound of waters flowing. 
As if all sights and sounds combined 

To mock his irremediable woe ; 
For not for him the blessed waters flow, 
For not for him the gales of evening blow, 

A fire is in his heart and brain, 
And Nature hath no healing for his pain." 



ROBERT SOUTHEY US 

Wordsworth hit on a good criticism of Southey when he 
complained of his lack of ideality. In composing a poem, 
Wordsworth said, Southey was content with choosing a subject, 
and then reading up about it carefully : he did not, as the 
great poet must, conceive and passionately hold fast a central 
idea of which the poem is the exposition. Hence he failed "to 
give anything which impresses the mind strongly, and is recol- 
lected in solitude." 

This is true, and it is final. Southey's best poetry is tho- 
roughly good, nay, in a sense it is first-rate, the cunning admir- 
able work of a thoroughly competent craftsman ; and, as such, 
it ought never to be deposed from the high place which by right 
it holds in English literature. But it is poetry of erudition and 
skill, not poetry of passion or prophecy. It is the work of one 
neither intoxicated with the beauty of things, nor testifying of 
those supreme realities in which the beautiful and the true are 
indistinguishable. And therefore all the labour has an in- 
adequate result. Southey gave nothing "which impresses the 
mind strongly, and is recollected in solitude." 

The two principal achievements of Southey as Laureate, the 
Carme7i Nuptiale on the marriage of Princess Charlotte, and the 
unlucky Vision of Judgment on the death of George III., add 
nothing to his best reputation. Yet the scorn which they pro- 
voked at the time was political rather than literary. Hazlitt 
brought down a quite disproportionately heavy mass of dis- 
approbation on the Carmen Nuptiale, not because the poem was 
bad, but because Southey, the renegade republican, was now a 
court official. The same feeling, mixed with personal jealousy 
and resentment, inspired Byron's reply to The Vision of Judg- 
ment, The Vision is, as poetry, as bad as Southey's worst 
enemy could have desired : it is an attempt, in bad hexameters, 
at the Dantesque sublime, which, for sheer lack of humour and 
impotence of imagination, bears off the palm, even among such 
pieces de circonstance. Byron might have spared himself the 
trouble of writing his counter- F/j/c-w, which, as poetry, is not 
much better than Southey's, and is, in effect, hardly more 
blasphemous. But in the preface to his Vision, Southey had 
attacked Byron, without naming him, as the founder of a 
" Satanic school " of poetry (he was thinking of Beppo and the 
early part of Don Juan) ; and it was in self-defence, as much as 



114 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

in virtuous condemnation of George III., that Byron lashed out 
with his sting. 

Some strong literary friendships added to the happiness of 
Southey's life. The friendship with Coleridge was spoiled by 
the family complications. That with Charles Lamb tended 
towards a kind of death by slow petrifaction, De Quincey 
Southey came to dislike actively as time went on. His intel- 
lectual sympathies were with a different type among his con- 
temporaries, and especially with Walter Savage Landor and 
Sir Henry Taylor. 

To Wordsworth Southey was splendidly and consistently 
loyal. For constant intercourse they were rather inconveniently 
situated : they were too near to correspond by letter, and too 
far apart, and Southey was too busy, for even such excellent 
pedestrians to meet constantly. There seems never to have 
been any cloud between the two men. There were, no doubt, 
certain influences which made for estrangement. As long as 
Coleridge was in the Lake country at all, he hung upon the 
Wordsworths, and Southey, at Greta Hall, was identified with 
the opposite camp, that composed of Mrs. Coleridge and the 
children. Against increasing warmth of friendship there 
worked temperament : Wordsworth and Southey agreed in 
politics and in devotion to literature ; but both were exceedingly 
reserved, and neither had enough humour to overcome the 
reserve ; with each the envelope of self-contained domesticity 
had a shell-like hardness. Wordsworth cared passionately for 
none of his friends ; and Southey was not a man for whom 
anybody could care passionately. Intellectually, Wordsworth 
regarded him with cold approbation ; he approved this and 
that in his poems, but found them all wanting in the essentials. 
Still, the relations bore well the strain of time. Forty years 
the poets were neighbours ; and " loving friends " they may 
without much straining of words be said to have been. "In 
every relation of life, and every point of view, Wordsworth is 
a truly exemplary and admirable man." So Southey wrote of 
him after twenty years' proximity. Sometimes they would 
exchange visits of a few days. Sometimes the Greta Hall 
and Rydal folks would have long summer outings together and 
picnic here and there. One great expedition signalized 
Waterloo year. A bonfire was to be lit on Skiddaw, and on 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 115 

August 21, the Southeys, Words worths (the poet and his wife, 
Dorothy and the boy John), with other friends (among whom was 
a son of Johnson's Boswell), climbed the mountain to make the 
celebration. They set out about four in the afternoon ; roasted 
beef and boiled plum-pudding on the summit ; sang " God 
save the King" round flaming tar-barrels; fired cannon; and 
rolled blazing balls of tow and turpentine down the sides of the 
hill. Never, surely, was timeless Skiddaw disturbed by such a 
tumult of the children of time ! The only mishap was of 
Wordsworth's making. When boiling-water was wanted for 
punch it was found that somebody " with a red cloak on " had 
overturned the kettle. The red cloak was brought home to 
Wordsworth ; he had thrown one of Mrs. Southey's round his 
shoulders. " He thought to slink off undiscovered," wrote 
Southey ; " but I punished him by singing a parody which they 
all joined in ! * 'Twas yoii, that kicked the kettle down ! 'twas 
you. Sir, you ! ' " The water-drinking poet had done more harm 
than he realized. Some of the party had to take their rum 
stronger than otherwise they would have done (how far we 
have travelled in less than a hundred years !) ; and the descent 
of Skiddaw was made towards midnight in a rather scandalous 
manner. 

None of Wordsworth's contemporary critics was quite as 
deliberately and steadily admiring as Southey. The most solid 
and solemn expression of his judgment was given in 1829. 
It is important as containing the maximum of his dispraise. 
"A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor 
ever will be. I could point out some of his pieces which seem 
to me good for nothing, and not a few faulty passages, but 
I know of no poet in any language who has written so much 
that is good." In 18 14 (the year when TJie Excursion appeared) 
he had written : " I speak not from the partiality of friend- 
ship, nor because we have been so absurdly held up as both 
writing upon one concerted system of poetry, but with the 
most deliberate exercise of impartial judgment whereof I 
am capable, when I declare my full conviction that posterity 
will rank him with Milton." 

Southey's sun declined and set in a murky west. His 
first wife, the mother of his children, had to be taken from 
her home in 1834, and in 1837 she died without having recovered 



116 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

her mental health. A week or two before the end Southey 
wrote: "The worst has long been past, and when our sharp 
grief is over, we shall be thankful for her deliverance from the 
body of this death." 

To a man of sixty-four widowerhood may be an intolerable 
burden. Southey was to survive his wife not much more than 
five years, and they were not happy years. He went on with 
his work ; he saw friends ; he travelled ; but it was evident 
that he was broken irrecoverably. It was no sign to the 
contrary that in this condition he suddenly married again. At 
Lymington in Hampshire there lived a minor poetess called 
Caroline Bowles, in whose works Southey had long taken an 
interest, and with whom he had often corresponded. She was 
twelve years his junior. On his way back from the Continent 
he visited her at Lymington, and in 1839 they were married. 
It was a pity ; but there is no power to prevent such unseemly 
things. The marriage did not even arrest Southey's decline ; 
the fire and strength had gone from his face ; he was languid and 
torpid. Power of work, power of memory ebbed away. At 
last he could only look at his books with the old hunger, kiss 
them with the old passion. 

Even in 1840, three years before his death, he did not at 
first recognize Wordsworth when he went once to see him. 
" Then his eyes flashed for a moment with their former bright- 
ness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, 
patting with both hands his books affectionately like a child." 
Further and further into the shadow he passed ; until, in March, 
1843, what had long been oblivion deepened into death. 

"All in the wild March morning," Wordsworth and 
Quillinan, his son-in-law, came to the funeral. The grave is 
conspicuous in Crosthwaite churchyard ; and in the church 
there is a recumbent figure inscribed with Wordworth's lines. 
They are true to the man they commemorate. 

•' Ye vales and hills, whose beauty hither drew 
The poet's steps, and fixed him here ; on you 
His eyes have closed ; and ye loved books, no more 
Shall Southey feed upon your precious lore, 
To works that ne'er shall forfeit their renown 
Adding immortal labours of his own, — I 
Whether he traced historic truth with zeal 
For the state's guidance or the church's weal, 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 117 

Or fancy disciplined by curious art 
Informed his pen, or wisdom of the heart, 
Or judgments sanctioned in the patriot's mind 
By reverence for the rights of all mankind. 
Wide were his aims, yet in no human breast 
Could private feelings meet in holier rest. 
His joys — his griefs — have vanished like a cloud 
From Skiddaw's top ; but he to Heaven was vowed 
Through a life long and pure, and steadfast faith 
Calm'd in his soul the fear of change and death." 

It was Wordsworth who remarked on the accurate self- 
portraiture of Southey's well-known lyric, written in 1818 — 

" My days among the Dead are past ; 

Around me I behold, 
Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 

The mighty minds of old ; 
My never-failing friends are they, 
With whom I converse day by day. 

*' With them I take delight in weal 
And seek relief in woe ; 
And while I understand and feel 

How much to them I owe, 
My cheeks have often been bedew'd 
With tears of thoughtful gratitude. 

" My thoughts are with the Dead, with them 
I live in long-past years. 
Their virtues love, their faults condemn, 

Partake their hopes and fears. 
And from their lessons seek and find 
Instruction with an humble mind. 

'My hopes are with the Dead, anon 
My place with them will be. 
And I with them will travel on 

Through all Futurity ; 
Yet leaving here a name, I trust, 

That will not perish in the dust." 



CHAPTER VI 
GRASMERE 

WORDSWORTH'S winter in Germany in 1798-9 left no 
permanent mark on his life. Had Wordsworth been a 
rather different man, the result might have been very different. 
To a poet of his temperament and at his age, nothing more 
stimulating might have happened than a visit to the Germany 
of those days. For Wordsworth was an " innovator, a literary 
reformer, a Romanticist ; and the land in which he sojourned 
was in the blaze of its Aufkldnmg, in the stir of a Romantic 
movement more many-sided than that in Britain, and, in its 
results, perhaps, even more solidly constructive. When Words- 
worth and his sister, with Coleridge, landed at Hamburg in 
September, 1798, German literature was ending its first modern 
half-century of genuine native vigour, and several imperishable 
monuments of its thought were already there, plain to see. 
Among them, Lessing the critic, and Klopstock and Wieland 
the poets, had broken the spell of French influence, and had 
claimed a large place in the world for the inborn Teutonic 
spirit ; and, though the poets were to survive as little more than 
names, Lessing was to live as one of the greatest of modern 
critics. For more than thirty years The Sorrows of Werther 
and Gotz von Berlichingen, pure types respectively of sentimental 
and picturesque Romanticism, had been before the world. 
They were the work of Goethe ; and, by 1798, Goethe had done 
much of his greater work, beside which Gotz and Werther have 
a merely curious and historic interest — work like the lyrics, the 
first part of Fanst, and Wilhehn Meister — which far transcends 
any petty antithesis of "classical" and "romantic." And Ger- 
man philosophy was well in line with German literature. For 
in that same year, 1798, German thought had been powerfully 

118 



GRASMERE 119 

influenced for seventeen years by the mature philosophy of 
Immanuel Kant. In all respects the intellectual fascination of 
Germany was strong and might have been overpowering. 
There was, no doubt, another side to the picture. The want 
of political unity in Germany was reflected in German intel- 
lectual life ; as patriotism was local rather than national, much 
of literature was a thing of coteries and cliques, and its 
national import might easily miss being realized. Yet there 
was enough, both in prose and verse, one would have thought, 
to arrest a mind like Wordsworth's, and give it a powerful 
bent. 

And was not Coleridge his companion, Coleridge the critic 
on a level with Lessing, Coleridge the close student of con- 
temporary philosophy, who well knew Kant and his importance, 
and was to be identified more nearly than with anything else, 
with the triumphs and mysteries of German idealism ? The 
companionship, we must notice, soon broke down. The poets 
parted at Hamburg, Coleridge going to Ratzeburg, from which 
he afterwards migrated to Gottingen ; and the Wordsworths 
taking up their quarters at Goslar, south of Brunswick, near the 
Harz mountains. Coleridge took his German visit seriously ; 
he worked hard at the language ; matriculated at the University 
of Gottingen, and collected materials for a life of Lessing. The 
Wordsworths' sojourn, on the other hand, was very nearly a 
failure. Goslar was as dull as ditchwater ; the climate was cold, 
and it was the hardest winter of the century ; the Wordsworths 
were not good at making friends ; Wordsworth detested tobacco ; 
from the social point of view in Germany, Dorothy was an 
encumbrance to her brother. They made small progress in 
Germany, and the months flowed on drearily. Before parting 
from Coleridge they met Klopstock's brother at Hamburg, and 
saw Klopstock himself, from whom they got a very garbled 
account of the state of German literature. Wieland was repre- 
sented as more important than Goethe. Kant, Klopstock found 
" utterly incomprehensible " ; " Kant," Wordsworth represented 
him as saying, " had appeared ambitious to be the founder of 
a sect ; he had succeeded ; but the Germans were now coming 
to their senses again." 

This kind of thing fitted in with Wordsworth's prejudices. 
He was intensely insular. He could feel the beating of the 



120 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

universal heart, but not easily through books ; it must com- 
municate itself to him through the mountains and the groves, 
the changing clouds and frolicking lambs of his native land. 
Goethe was too non-moral to be even tolerable to him ; he 
hated him to the end of his life. Wordsworth was a philosopher, 
indeed, and an idealist ; but his philosophy was his own : he 
was no student, and would never have had patience or docility 
enough to enrich his thought with the systematic thought of the 
Germans, expressed in their difficult tongue. 

And so, though he was by no means idle at Goslar, his 
energy was the energy of reminiscence. He neither studied 
Kant nor read Goethe ; he was nearly frozen to death in his 
bedroom over an unceiled passage in a draper's house ; he was 
not fortunately situated with respect to the attainment of his 
main object, a knowledge of the language. Nor was he well : 
he was weakly, and suffered from pain in the side. While he 
walked in the freezing days in the ghost-haunted imperial town, 
his spirit wandered still in lakeland or among the Alfoxden 
hollies, and the serene purpose of the lonely English poet lost 
no whit of its individuality. It may be too much to say, as 
Mr. Myers has said, that " the four months spent at Goslar were 
the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career ; " but it is not 
too much to say that they were no interruption to that career, 
that, on the contrary, they forwarded it by a kind of force of 
antagonism. He composed his verses by Dorothy's side, or 
" with no companion but a kingfisher " glancing by him, as he 
walked in the public gardens. In his exile, he felt himself like 
a half-dead fly he saw crawling back to life in the warmth of 
the dreary un-English stove as he toiled over his German. He 
hated the look of the heraldic Brunswick horse on the stove. 

*' A plague on your languages, German and Norse ! 
Let me have the song of the kettle ; 
And the tongs and the poker, instead of that horse, 
That gallops away with such fury and force 
On this dreary dull plate of black metal. 

" See that Fly, — a disconsolate creature ! 
perhaps 
A child of the field or the grove ; 
And, sorrow for him ! the dull treacherous heat 
Has seduced the poor fool from his winter retreat. 
And he creeps to the edge of my stove." 



GRASMERE 121 

Could but the fly be saved till the summer ; could but the 
poet be restored to the places he loved ! 

" God is my witness, thou small helpless thing ! 
Thy life I would gladly sustain 
Till summer come up from the south, and with crowds 
Of thy brethren a march thou shouldst sound through the clouds, 
And back to the forests again ! " 

But at least the poet could dream of home scenes and 
folk. It was at Goslar that he wrote Nuttings that record of 
spiritual progress at Hawkshead that we already know. Here, 
too, he recalled the deathbed of Taylor, the Hawkshead head- 
master, in an " address " to the Hawkshead scholars. 

" I kissed his cheek before he died ; 
And when his breath was fled, 
I raised, while kneeling by his side, 
His hand : — it dropped like lead. 
Your hands, dear little ones, do all 
That can be done, will never fall 
Like his till they are dead." 

It was at Goslar that he wrote Lucy Gray and Ruth — Lucy 
Gray, founded on an incident near Halifax, told him by 
Dorothy, an experiment in the Wordsworthian spiritualization 
of " things common " ; Ruth, a ballad of 

" An innocent life, yet far astray ! " 
which grew out of a west country story. 

" That oaten pipe of hers is mute. 
Or thrown away ; but with a flute 
Her loneliness she cheers ; 
This flute, made of a hemlock stalk. 
At evening in his homeward walk 
The Quantock woodman hears." 

To Goslar, too, belong the Lticy poems, that strange little 
lovely group, which breathe a passion unfamiliar to Words- 
worth, and about which he — so ready to talk about the genesis 
of his poems — has told us nothing. Was it pure idealization ? 
Why not ? Or was it idealization started by some fugitive 
fancy ? Or was there something deeper at the base, unspoken 
and unspeakable } Does it matter ? Let a poet keep some of 
his secrets : we need not grudge him the privacy when the 
poetry is as beautiful as this ; when there is such celebration of 
girlhood, love, and death. Who does not know, who can too 



122 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

often hear about, the girl whom Nature trained with her own 
hand ? In the strange spaces of the Harz Forest, Wordsworth 
saw and described the training. 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, ' A loveHer flower 
On earth was never sown ; 
This Child I to myself will take ; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 
A Lady of my own. 

" ' Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse : and with me 

The Girl, in rock and plain. 

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 

Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle or restrain. 
" ' She shall be sportive as the fawn 

That wild with glee across the lawn 

Or up the mountain springs ; 

And hers shall be the breathing balm, 

And hers the silence and the calm 

Of mute insensate things. 

" ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the Storm 
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 
By silent sympathy. 

"'The Stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face. 

•' ' And vital feelings of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height 
Her virgin bosom swell ; 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
While she and I together live 
Here in the happy dell.' 

" Thus Nature spake — The work was done — 
How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 
She died, and left to me 
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene ; 
The memory of what has been. 
And never more will be." 



GRASMERE 123 

The thought of Lucy added bitterness to the separation 
rom England. 

" I travelled among unknown men, 
In lands beyond the sea ; 
Nor, England ! did I know till then 
What love I bore to thee." 

He will not again go abroad, for — 

" She I cherished turned her wheel 
Beside an English fire." 

Who and what was she ? 

" She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
Beside the springs of Dove ; 
A Maid whom there were none to praise, 
And very few to love : 

" A violet by a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye ! 
— Fair as a star, when only one 
Is shining in the sky." 

She died — after Nature's blessed work was done, indeed ; 
and before she had lost her girlhood. 

" She is in her grave, and, oh. 
The difference to me ! " 

The poet's sense of loss is sublime in its utter simplicity. 
He finds harmony rather than harshness in the contrast between 
the illusion of love and the fact of death. 

" A slumber did my spirit seal ; 
I had no human fears ; 
She seemed a thing that could not feel 
The touch of earthly years. 

" No motion has she now, no force ; 
She neither hears nor sees ; 
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
With rock, and stones, and trees." 

At Goslar, Wordsworth wrote the spirited apologia for poetry 
called A Poefs Epitaph. But the energy of reminiscence and 
verse-making brought about greater results than any of these. 

The idea which had haunted him at Alfoxden, the idea of a 
great poem on the relations of Man and Nature, haunted him 
still. This was to be his life-work, his epic, his product which 



124 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" posterity would not willingly let die." At Goslar, as we have 
seen, he meditated much on his Hawkshead schooldays ; and 
more and more his subject presented itself to him in an auto- 
biographical shape. No better introduction, he felt, could be 
found for a poem on Man and the World, than a poem on the 
growth of his own mind, a poetic record of the process by which 
he and Nature won each other — the "spousal verse" of that 
particular " consummation." 

Accordingly, when the happy moment arrived of release 
from imperial, frosty, dreary Goslar, as he drove towards 
Gottingen and Coleridge, Wordsworth began The Prelude. He 
felt like a bird freed from a cage. " O there is blessing," he 
sang, as the horses' feet carried him along — 

" O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, 
A visitant that while it fans my cheek 
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings." 

To the breeze without, there was an answering stir of the 
poet's spirit ; within as without, there was the sense of the 
break-up of a long frost. The poet was free once more ; free 
to settle where he would, to do what he would. It was another 
crisis, like the crisis of the morning after the ball. And it was 
met in the same spirit. 

" To the open fields I told 
A prophecy : poetic numbers came 
Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe 
A renovated spirit singled out, 
Such hope was mine, for holy ser^dces." 

As one reads on in The Prelude, one passes without a 
break — so the poet idealized the facts — from the departure from 
Goslar to the settlement at Grasmere. And, indeed, even 
biography has little to say about the intervening months. After 
paying a good long visit to Coleridge at Gottingen, William 
and Dorothy returned to England in the spring of 1799. 
There was no possibility of going back to Alfoxden, and they 
at once made for the North, going to stay with the Hutchinsons 
at Sockburn-on-Tees, on the borders of Durham and Yorkshire. 
That was their headquarters through the summer and autumn. 
It was the North, the land of mountain and flood ; but it was 
not the Lake Country. Hardly yet had Wordsworth, the 



GRASMERE 125 

Cockermouth child, the Hawkshead schoolboy, familiar with 
Esthwaite and Windermere, penetrated into the central Paradise. 
He was to do so now ; he was to occupy it, to take possession 
of it, for ever. 

In September, he walked over into Westmorland with his 
sailor brother John and Coleridge. They entered the Paradise 
from Ambleside. As we think of them let us join ourselves to 
their shades, and go with them, as they advance to this immortal 
conquest. Two of our companions, we know, are good company. 
What of John Wordsworth, the sailor ? Alas ! we shall hear 
much of him in the next chapter. Meanwhile, take a beautiful 
sentence about him, written by Coleridge to Dorothy. "Your 
brother John is one of you ; a man who hath solitary usings of 
his own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle tact, a swift 
instinct of truth and beauty." 

The most natural road by which to leave Ambleside is that 
which follows at some distance the course of the Rothay. It is 
broad, level, and shady ; rich woods fringe the lower slopes of 
Loughrigg on the left ; sweet meadows lie along the stream ; 
the park-land of Rydal Hall, with noble trees and verdant 
meads, is on the right. But the magnet which draws the traveller 
is the mountain mass ahead of him, the fascination of the 
cloudy blue heights of Fairfield, which he sees, and the know- 
ledge that greater Helvellyn rises beyond, out of sight. Bright 
streams, Scandale beck, Rydal beck, come down from the right 
to add their waters to the Rothay. Rydal Hall seems to 
dominate the valley, with Fairfield and his tributary. Nab Scar, 
towering just behind. What will the road do when it gets under 
the hills ? Will it take Rydal Hall by storm and be carried over 
the mountains ? The road, followed closely by our ghostly band, 
avoids Rydal and gently carries us to the left, till we find that 
we are in a valley running north-westward, with Nab Scar rising 
steeply on the right, gentler Loughrigg opposite, and the love- 
liest of lakes opening before us. It is Rydal lake, out of which 
the Rothay.has come, and the road takes us for about a mile and 
a half along its whole length. At its further extremity we are 
confronted by a shoulder of hill which must be either surmounted 
or circumvented. The modern highroad circumvents it, round- 
ing the lake, and keeping close to the Rothay, which is here, 
again, murmuring in a woody gorge. But for us ghosts of 1 799 



126 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

there is no such road : we climb straight forward, keeping to 
what was then the only coach-road, or we may, if we will, and 
if we know exactly what we are making for, keep to the right, 
following bridle-paths over the moss and the rocks. In the 
thirties, Dr. Arnold of Rugby christened the three ways from 
Rydal to Grasmere — beginning with the rough path furthest to 
the right — Old Corruption, Bit-by-bit Reform, and Radical 
Reform. To-day let us keep to the Bit-by-bit Reform road : 
it is wild enough for anybody ; the heather is still aglow ; the 
bright moss is wet with trickling streamlets ; there is scarlet 
lichen on the rocks ; though only the creamy, starfish-like 
rosettes of the butterwort leaves are to be seen, and there is no 
chance now of finding even a late specimen of the pink " mealy " 
primrose, there is plenty of the beautiful grass of Parnassus in 
the boggy places. We have not gone far before we realize that 
the road is bearing us to the right, and then, suddenly, we look 
down on a new lake, and we are in Grasmere Vale. 

Grasmere Vale, with its long oval lake, and the scattered 
hamlet with the simple church at its further or north-western end, 
was to be Wordsworth's home for thirteen years. It is more truly 
and vitally, biographically and spiritually as well as scenically and 
physically, the centre of the Lake District than even Ambleside, 
from above which we first took stock of the neighbourhood. 
Endowed with the utmost beauty granted to the region, as beauti- 
ful, essentially, as UUswater or Derwentwater, it has a repose, an 
inwardness, a perfect tranquillity, which are all its own. And 
these things it had even more completely when Wordsworth 
dwelt within it. For now, though no railway-sounds insult it, 
the coach-road from Ambleside to Keswick follows closely its 
north-eastern shore, and carries a constant stream of pleasure- 
seeking traffic through its very heart. Wordsworth lived to see 
the construction of that road, and to lament it with the indulged 
querulousness of a spoilt poet. But, when he was most identified 
with the vale, the road ran high above the lake and at some 
distance back from it, and only a rough path, fit for poets, 
anglers, or lovers, lay between the broad expanse and its 
girdling mountains. 

" A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags, 
A rude and natural causeway, interposed 



GRASMERE 127 

Between the water and a winding slope 

Of copse and thicket, leaves the eastern shore 

Of Grasmere safe in its own privacy." 

The character of shy inwardness is given to Grasmere by the 
fact that it lies almost at right angles to Rydal and not in line 
with it, so that the traveller has, as it were, to seek for it ere he 
finds it. And when he does find it, and his eye rests on its 
quiet church-tower, and on the mountains that rise behind the 
church and the village, he feels that no more central citadel is to 
be won. 

As a schoolboy, Wordsworth had looked into this sweet and 
holy place on a summer's day, and had hoped it might be his 
lot to live and die there. The centre of his Lakeland, it became 
the centre of his own affections and genius. He thought of it 
often ; and the place became — 

" As beautiful to thought, as it had been 
When present, to the bodily sense ; a haunt 
Of pure affections, shedding upon joy 
A brighter joy ; and through such damp and gloom 
Of the gay mind as ofttimes splenetic youth 
Mistakes for sorrow, darting beams of light 
That no self-cherished sadness could withstand." 

And now, in September, 1799, ^^e poet, in his thirtieth year, 
is looking down on the lake again. With his companions, he 
had climbed from Rydal, like Benjamin the Waggoner whom he 
was to celebrate — 

"Now he leaves the lower ground, 
And up the craggy hill ascending 
Many a stop and stay he makes, 
Many a breathing-fit he takes ; — 
Steep the way and wearisome " 

— at all events for a waggon-team and a thirsty driver ! After 
the " wishing-gate " is passed, the road descends upon the lake 
level, which it reaches close to the head of the lake, and a short 
half-mile from the church. Just above the level, on the right- 
hand side of the road, there stood, in Wordsworth's childhood, 
a whitewashed public-house, the "Dove and Olive Bough," 
which — 

" Offered a greeting of good ale 
To all who entered Grasmere Vale ; " 



128 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

but now, when he descends the hill with Coleridge and brother 
John, the sign is gone and the house is empty. 

The travellers stayed some days at Grasmere, and John left 
his brother and Coleridge there. Both were delighted with the 
place in spite of bad weather ; and Wordsworth had what he 
was afraid Dorothy would consider a " mad " idea of building a 
house by the lake. If that was a mad idea, what about the old 
" Dove and Olive Bough," the empty cottage at " Town End," 
by the side of the Ambleside road ? Might that not do for a 
home .«* On his return to Sockburn Wordsworth talked over 
the matter with Dorothy, and the end of it was that the empty 
cottage at Town End was taken, to be the home first of the 
brother and sister and then of the brother's wife as well, for nine 
years, and to be famous as " Dove Cottage " for evermore. 

It was on one of the last days of the year, St. Thomas' Day, 
1799, that the "flitting" from Yorkshire was made. The two 
companions did it on foot, coming by Askrigg, and through 
Wensleydale (where they heard the story of " Hart Leap Well ") 
to Kendal, and so on into the vale. " On Nature's invitation " 
he sang afterwards : — 

" On Nature's invitation do I come, 
By Reason sanctioned." 

" Bleak was it," he went on : — 

*' Bleak season was it, turbulent and bleak. 
When hitherward we journeyed side by side 
Through burst of sunshine and through flying showers ; 



Stern was the face of Nature ; we rejoiced 

In that stern countenance, for our souls thence drew 

A feeling of their strength. The naked trees, 

The icy brooks, as on we passed, appeared 

To question us. ' Whence come ye, to what end ? ' 

They seemed to say, ' What would ye?' 

Said the shower, 
' Wild Wanderers, whither through my dark domain ? ' 
The sunbeam said, ' Be happy.' When this vale 
We entered, bright and solemn was the sky 
That faced us with a passionate welcoming, 
And led us to our threshold." 

The Grasmere years, thus entered upon, are, beyond question, 
the central period of Wordsworth's poetic life. That life beats 



GRASMERE 120 

at its strongest under the humble roof of Dove Cottage, and 
is fed to its richest results, by the scenes and the folk, the hills 
and the wild vales of that narrow place. For one thing — 
perhaps for chief thing — the blessing of Windybrow, Racedown, 
Alfoxden, and Goslar was continued to the poet : he there had 
the companionship of Dorothy, and he had it for a year or two 
without the distraction of new family love. As his sister had 
been to him on the banks of Wye, so she was on the shores 
of Grasmere. As he thinks of her, he asks his very heart to 
pause on the thought. 

" Pause upon that and let the breathing frame 
No longer breathe, but all be satisfied. 



. Mine eyes did ne'er 
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind 
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts, 
But either she whom now I have, who now 
Divides with me this loved abode, was there 
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned 
Her voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, 
The thought of her was like a flash of light 
Or an unseen companionship, a breath 
Of fragrance independent of the Wind." 

In the fragment of The Rechise from which these lines are 
taken, Wordsworth gives his version of the setting of his new 
home. 

" Embrace me, then, ye Hills, and close me in ; 
Now in the clear and open day I feel 
Your guardianship ; I take it to my heart ; 
'Tis like the solemn shelter of the night. 
But I would call thee beautiful, for mild, 
And soft, and gay, and beautiful thou art. 
Dear Valley, having in thy face a smile 
Though peaceful, full of gladness. Thou art pleased, 
Pleased with thy crags and woody steeps, thy Lake, 
Its one green island and its winding shores ; 
The multitude of little rocky hills. 
Thy Church and cottages of mountain stone 
Clustered like stars some few, but single most. 
And lurking dimly in their shy retreats, 
Or glancing at each other cheerful looks 
Like separated stars with clouds between." 
K 



130 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

All the sights and sounds of beautiful country are here, but 
at Grasmere there is something beyond these. 

" These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth 
Have also these, but nowhere else is found 
The one sensation that is here ; 'tis here, 
Here as it found its way into my heart 
In childhood, here as it abides by day, 
By night, here only ; or in chosen minds 
That take it with them hence, where'er they go. 
— 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense 
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 
A blended holiness of earth and sky, 
Something that makes this individual spot, 
This small abiding-place of many men, 
A termination, and a last retreat, 
A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will. 
A whole without dependence or defect, 
Made for itself, and happy in itself. 
Perfect contentment, Unity entire." 

Thanks to the poetry and patriotism of an eminent English- 
man, himself a poet and a richly endowed critic, Dove Cottage 
is now national property, kept as Wordsworth made it, and 
accessible to every reverent foot and eye. Let us enter, then, 
and look round. 

Behind the cottage the hill rises steeply, so steeply and so 
immediately that the garden and orchard with which Words- 
worth's verse has made us so familiar must be a veritable 
hanging garden. For between the house and the road there is 
no room for pleasure ground of any kind ; you could drop a 
stone sheer from the latticed windows on the road below. The 
pretty diamond panes give charm to the plain white front of the 
house, up which creepers climb. When De Quincey first saw it 
two yew trees broke the " glare " of the white walls. There is a 
little gate in the rough stone wall, and the door opens at the end 
and not in the front of the house. What De Quincey calls 
" a little semi-vestibule " brings you to the principal ground-floor 
room (the only room on the ground floor, in fact, except 
Dorothy's bedroom and the kitchen). It is a quaint little 
living-room, with a most serviceable and kitchen-like fireplace, 
and De Quincey, who knew it so well, shall describe it. " An 
oblong square not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet 



GRASMERE 131 

long, and twelve broad ; very prettily wainscoted from the floor 
to the ceiling with dark polished oak, slightly embellished with 
carving. One window there was — a perfect and unpretending 
cottage window, with little diamond panes embowered at every 
season of the year with roses ; and, in the summer and autumn, 
with a profusion of jasmine and other fragrant shrubs. From 
the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, and from 
the dark hue of the wainscoting, this window, though tolerably 
large, did not furnish a very powerful light." This was the 
essential family-room, the dining-room of the Wordsworths. A 
modest staircase of fourteen steps (so De Quincey had counted) 
brings one to the corresponding two rooms above, a little 
drawing-room over the dining-room, and Wordsworth's bedroom 
over Dorothy's. In the drawing-room, too, the fireplace is 
kitchen-like ; the room has old-fashioned high-backed chairs 
with Dorothy's work on the seats ; and it was Wordsworth's 
study, " for in a small recess " there are bookshelves, and in 
those bookshelves reposed the library of the most unbookish of 
poets, a collection of " perhaps three hundred volumes." There 
are two other small rooms upstairs : one specially tiny one 
without a fireplace the Wordsworths built, and Dorothy papered 
it, and the tiny passage leading to it, with newspapers. 

De Quincey did not see Dove Cottage until 1807. When 
the Wordsworths took it there were no creepers on the walls, 
but the new tenants at once set about planting roses and 
honeysuckle, and in their first year had a bright show of scarlet 
runner against the whitewash. Come out now through a back- 
door into the steep garden and orchard behind ; for here 
probably more Wordsworthianism came to the birth than 
within any of the walls. The rough stone steps leading up the 
incline are there as Wordsworth laid them ; there are such 
flowers as he planted, and the well he made ; there are the 
apple-trees which justify the word " orchard " ; there, at the top 
of the steep little enclosure, is the view-point, and there was the 
moss-hut in the old days. There were then no stifling houses, 
no prosaic chimney-tops between the cottage and the lake ; 
there was no big modern hotel ; there were no crowds of 
pleasure-seekers. Nothing disturbed the feeling of "termina- 
tion " and of " last retreat." In his delightful pamphlet about 
Dove Cottage. Mr. Stopford Brooke has said all that needs to be 



132 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

said or can be said about the garden and orchard in their vital 
relation to Wordsworth's poetry. But indeed we need not go 
beyond the limits of that poetry, supplemented by Dorothy's 
prose, to be able to feel our way about the little enclosure as 
well as out beyond it. Here was the hedge-sparrow's nest with 
the "bright blue eggs" which recalled a similar one in the 
Cockermouth garden. 

" On me the chance-discovered sight 
Gleamed like a vision of delight. 
I started — seeming to espy 
The home and sheltered bed, 
The sparrow's dwelling, which, hard by 
My Father's house, in wet or dry 
My sister Emmeline and I 
Together visited." 

[" Emmeline" is, of course, conventional-poetical for Dorothy] — 

" She looked at it and seemed to fear it ; 
Dreading, tho' wishing, to be near it ; 
Such heart was in her, being then 
A little Prattler among men. 
The Blessing of my later years 
Was with me when a boy : 
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears ; 
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; 
And love, and thought, and joy." 

It was from the orchard that the cuckoo was heard — 

" While I am lying on the grass 
Thy twofold shout I hear. 

And I can listen to thee yet ; 

Can lie upon the plain. 
And listen, till I do beget 

That golden time again." 

Here, in and out of this apple or pear tree, flashed the green 
linnet, the "Brother of the dancing leaves," whose song, "poured 
forth in gushes," is so unrealistically described. Here on the 
turf shone the celandine and the daisy, to the former of which 
Wordsworth sang two songs, and to the latter three. Here the 
robin was scolded for chasing a butterfly — 



GRASMERE 133 

" Would'st thou be happy in thy nest, 

pious Bird, whom man loves best, 
Love him, or leave him alone ! " 

Here the butterfly itself was apostrophized — 

" I've watched you now a full half-hour, 
Self-poised upon that yellow flower ; 
And, little Butterfly ! indeed 

1 know not if you sleep or feed. 
How motionless ! — not frozen seas 
More motionless ! and then 

What joy awaits you, when the breeze 
Hath found you out among the trees, 
And calls you forth again ! 

" This plot of orchard-ground is ours ; 
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers ; 
Here rest your wings when they are weary ; 
Here lodge as in a sanctuary ! 
Come often to us, fear no wrong ; 
Sit near us on the bough ! 
We'll talk of sunshine and of song. 
And summer days, when we were young ; 
Sweet childish days, that were as long 
As twenty days are now." 

Here is the " rocky Well " beside which were planted the 
globe-flowers and marsh-marigolds from the lake-side. Here 
on the grass lay Coleridge in the early Grasmere days, and 
here Wordsworth looked at him and sang of him that mysterious 
song so hard to interpret — the Stanzas written in my Pocket- 
Copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence. Who is who in that 
poem? * This, anyhow, must be Coleridge — 

" Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this Man 
When he came back to us, a withered flower, — 
Or, like a sinful creature, pale and wan. 
Down would he sit ; and without strength or power 
Look at the common grass from hour to hour : 
And oftentimes, how long I fear to say. 
Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower. 
Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay ; 
And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away." 

* I myself incline to the belief that the second character — the " noticeable Man 
with large grey eyes " — is neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth but some one else, very 
likely, as has been conjectured, William Calvert, Raisley Calvert's brother. But no 
theory removes all the difficulties. See Mr. Knight's notes on the poem, "Knight's 
Wordsworth," II. 307-9, and Appendix. 



134 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Beyond the limits of the garden and the orchard, up on the 
heights above the old Ambleside road, and round the crescent 
at the head of the lake — Easedale opening on the other side, 
and Dunmail Raise rising up behind — how full was the tide of 
poetry between 1800 and 1808! Hammer Scar and the Helm 
and Silver How, there they all are ; down Easedale yonder, 
runs the rivulet by which the poet roamed " in the confusion of 
his heart " one April morning ; the rivulet which — 

" Sent forth such sallies of glad sound, that all 
Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice 
Of common pleasure : beast and bird, the lamb. 
The shepherd's dog, the linnet and the thrush 
Vied with this waterfall, and made a song. 
Which, while I listened, seemed like the wild growth 
Or like some natural produce of the air, 
That could not cease to be." 

Very different associations cling to " the boisterous brook of 
Greenhead Ghyll " which tumbles down through a wild chink 
in the hills that rise on the right about half a mile out of 
Grasmere as you mount the Raise northwards ; for there is the 
"unfinished sheepfold," and there (as Wordsworth arranged 
certain facts) the tragedy of Michael was accomplished. Up 
the Raise road to Wythburn and Thirlmere, toiled the 
Waggoner's horses. Stone-Arthur is on the right, the " Eminence 
of these our hills " — which can not be seen from the Dove 
Cottage orchard, though it suited the poet to say that it could — 
the hill which, as William and Dorothy walked on the road, 
seemed to restore their hearts with its " deep quiet " ; in 
truth— 

" The loneliest place we have among the clouds." 

Dorothy named it after her brother — 

" She who dwells with me, whom I have loved 
With such communion that no place on earth 
Can ever be a solitude to me. 
Hath to this lonely summit given my Name." 

Was that the mountain-top upon which the star listened to 
the voices of earth on that September evening in 1806, when 
the poet had "just read in a newspaper that the dissolution of 
Mr. Fox was hourly expected " ? What an evening for such a 



GRASMERE 135 

poet to realize that such a man was passing "to breathless 
Nature's dark abyss ! " Wordsworth had loved Fox because he 
loved French liberty ; for him he was both good and great. 

" Loud is the Vale ! the Voice is up 
With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
A mighty unison of streams ! 
Of all her Voices, One ! 

" Loud is the Vale ; — this inland Depth 
In peace is roaring like the Sea ; 
Yon star upon the mountain-top 
Is listening quietly. 



When the great and good depart 
What is it more than this — 

" That Man, who is from God sent forth, 
Doth yet again to God return ?" 

Up towards the wild White-moss, across which comes the 
highest route from Rydal, and quite near the Town End 
Cottage, there are at least two spots sacred to genius. There 
is the ''stately Fir grove," which was "a favourite haunt with 
us all," and which offered a grateful shelter in the snowy days 
of the first winter at Grasmere. It was — 

" A cloistral place 
Of refuge, with an unencumbered floor. 
Here, in soft covert, on the shallow snow, 
And sometimes, on a speck of visible earth, 
The redbreast near me hopped." 

Here would come stray sheep, "stragglers from some 
mountain-flock," surveying the pacing poet "with suspicious 
stare "— 

" Huddling together from two fears — the fear 
Of me and of the storm." 

And, as we shall find in the next chapter, the place had 
deeper and dearer associations. In that direction, too, a few 
hundred yards from the cottage, one autumn day in 1800, 
Wordsworth met the hero of Resohition and Independence, an 
old leech-gatherer bent double, with an apron and a night-cap, 
who was on his way to Carlisle to try to make a living by 
selling "godly books." He told him his story, and the poet 
afterwards placed him in a different setting of scenery. It 



136 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

was not at Grasmere but on Barton Fell, near the north- 
eastern end of Ullswater, that Wordsworth walked one morning 
after a night of wind and rain — 

" There was a roaring in the wind all night ; 
The rain came heavily and fell in floods ; 
But now the sun is rising calm and bright ; 
The birds are singing in the distant woods ; 
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods ; 
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters ; 
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. 

" All things that love the sun are out of doors ; 
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth ; 
The grass is bright with rain-drops ; — on the moors 
The hare is running races in her mirth ; 
And with her feet she from the plashy earth 
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun, 
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run." 

It was there and then that the poet fell into despondency ; 
that— 

" Fears and fancies thick upon me came ; 
Dim sadness — and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name." 

He felt himself little better than an idler: he thought of 
Chatterton, of Burns ; he was in Burns's mood when he sang — 

"All in this mottie, misty clime, 
I backward mus'd on wasted time. 
How I had spent my youthfu' prime, 

And done nae-thing. 
But stringin' blethers up in rhyme, 

For fools to sing." 

Recollecting the emotion in tranquillity, he associated with 
his walk on Barton Fell, the leech-gatherer he met near Dove 
Cottage ; he placed him at his trade by a lonely pool ; the old 
man stood out before his memory, before his imagination, 
a completely idealized figure, " not all alive, nor dead," reveal- 
ing himself in simile after simile — 

" As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie 
Couched on the bald top of an eminence ; 
Wonder to all who do the same espy, 
By what means it could thither come, and whence j 
So that it seems a thing endued with sense : 



GRASMERE 137 

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf 
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself. 

Upon the margin of that moorish flood 
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, 
That heareth not the loud winds when they call 
And moveth all together, if it move at all." 

As he stirred the pool in an almost hopeless task, and for 
a pittance which it were mockery to call a livelihood, and yet 
kept his cheerfulness and dignity, his "rights of a man," he 
became for the poet the permanent symbol of resolution and 
independence ; so that he — 

" Could have laughed himself to scorn to find 
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind." 

By the side of the middle road, and overlooking the lake, 
stands the " Wishing-Gate," near which Wordsworth met " The 
Sailor's Mother." Further on, on the Rydal side of the hill, 
where the three roads into Grasmere diverge, were The Beggars 
about whom Dorothy told her brother. 

In 1802, not much more than two years after the brother 
and sister came to Grasmere, they went across the mountains 
into Yorkshire to fetch William's bride, Mary Hutchinson. 
Before starting, William wrote A Farewell to his home, of 
which the whole may well be quoted, not only for its beauty, 
but because of its clear showing of their life in the place — 

" Farewell, thou little Nook of mountain ground. 
Thou rocky corner in the lowest stair 
Of that magnificent temple which doth bound 
One side of one whole vale with grandeur rare ; 
Sweet garden-orchard, eminently fair, 
The loveliest spot that man hath ever found. 
Farewell ! — we leave thee to Heaven's peaceful care, 
Thee, and the Cottage which thou dost surround. 

" Our boat is safely anchored by the shore, 
And there will safely ride when we are gone ; 
The flowering shrubs that deck our humble door 
Will prosper, though untended and alone : 
Fields, goods, and far-off chattels we have none : 
These narrow bounds contain our private store 
Of things earth makes, and sun doth shine upon ; 
Here are they in our sight — we have no more. 



138 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" Sunshine and shower be with you, bud and bell ! 
For two months now in vain we shall be sought ; 
We leave you here in solitude to dwell 
With these our latest gifts of tender thought ; 
Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat. 
Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell ! 
Whom from the borders of the Lake we brought, 
And placed together near our rocky Well. 

" We go for One to whom ye will be dear ; 
And she will prize this Bower, this Indian shed. 
Our own contrivance, Building without peer ! 
— A gentle Maid, whose heart is lowly bred. 
Whose pleasures are in wild fields gathered, 
With joyousness, and with a thoughtful cheer, 
Will come to you ; to you herself will wed ; 
And love the blessed life that we lead here. 

" Dear spot ! which we have watched with tender heed, 
Bringing thee chosen plants and blossoms blown 
Among the distant mountains, flower and weed. 
Which thou hast taken to thee as thy own, 
Making all kindness registered and known ; 
Thou for our sakes, though Nature's child indeed. 
Fair in thyself and beautiful alone. 
Hast taken gifts which thou dost little need. 

" And O most constant, yet most fickle Place, 
That hast thy wayward moods, as thou dost show 
To them who look not daily on thy face ; 
Who, being loved, in love no bounds dost know, 
And say'st, when we forsake thee, ' Let them go ! ' 
Thou easy-hearted Thing, with Thy wild race 
Of weeds and flowers, till we return be slow, 
And travel with the year at a soft pace. 

" Help us to tell Her tales of years gone by, 
And this sweet spring, the best beloved and best ; 
Joy will be flown in its mortality ; 
Something must stay to tell us of the rest. 
Here, thronged with primroses, the steep rock's breast 
Glittered at evening like a starry sky ; 
And in this bush our Sparrow built her nest, 
Of which I sang one song that will not die. 

" O happy Garden ! whose seclusion deep 
Hath been so friendly to industrious hours ; 
And to soft slumbers, that did gently steep 
Our spirits, carrying with them dreams of flowers, 



I 



GRASMERE 139 

And wild notes warbled among leafy bowers ; 
Two burning months let summer overleap, 
And, coming back with Her who will be ours, 
Into thy bosom we again shall creep." 

After Wordsworth's descriptive and allusive Grasmere 
poetry, the next best original authorities for the Grasmere life 
are Dorothy's Journals, and Wordsworth's central poetry, which 
was, in its fulness, planned and carried out there, at Dove 
Cottage up to 1808 ; then, from 1808 to 181 1, at Allan Bank, 
round the head of the lake ; and at Grasmere Parsonage, from 
1811 to 1813. 

One side of the life, its daily character, its occupations, joys, 
and trials, is faithfully mirrored in Dorothy's Journals. If by a 
poetic life is meant a life of " plain living and high thinking," 
of simplicity and communion with Nature, surely no life more 
poetic than this one was ever lived. And, as in the west 
country, so now here among the Lakes, the part played by 
Dorothy was as important, as significant, as the part played by 
William — 

" She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears. 

And love and thought and joy." 

If that was true in the garden of childhood by the Derwent, 
if it was true among the coombs of Quantock and in the groves 
of Alfoxden, it was equally true in the holy place of Grasmere. 
If William was the interpreter of Nature, Dorothy was its 
registrar. And, as at Alfoxden her observation and registration 
were those of a poet and not of a naturalist, so was it at Gras- 
mere. " More than half a poet " she records that she felt in 
one moment of special rapture ; but indeed she was wholly, if 
but potentially, a poet at all times. There is, in the later as in 
the earlier Journals, in the utterance of maturest womanhood 
as in the effervescence of a girl's enthusiasm, the same devotion 
to the beautiful; the same spontaneity and orginality of 
expression ; the same charm of phrase ; the same startling 
vigour, at once realistic and imaginative, of epithet and simile. 
Her observation has an artist's minuteness ; it gives material 
for a thousand pictures. The commonest things are seen 
afresh, and invested with undying interest. Is it the old moon 
in the new moon's arms ? " On Friday evening the moon hung 



140 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

over the northern side of the highest point of Silver How, like 
a gold ring snapped in two, and shaven off at the ends. Within 
this ring lay the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be 
seen as ever the enlightened moon is. William had observed 
the same appearance at Keswick." Is it a birch tree in a 
strong October wind ? " It was yielding to the gusty wind 
with all its tender twigs. The sun shone upon it, and it glanced 
in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, 
with stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of water. . . . The ,; 
other birch trees that were near it looked bright and cheerful, |l 
but it was a creature by its own self among them." What effects 
on the water she saw ; what mimitice and mysteries of colour ! 
" Rydal was very beautiful, with spear-shaped streaks of polished 
steel." "The moon shone like herrings in the water." "We 
walked round Rydal lake, rich, calm, streaked, very beautiful." 
" We amused ourselves for a long time in watching the breezes, 
some as if they came from the bottom of the lake, spread in a 
circle, brushing along the surface of the water, and growing more 
delicate [and] as it were thinner, and of a paler colour till they 
died away." "We walked before tea by Bainriggs to observe 
the many-coloured foliage. The oaks dark green with yellow , 
leaves, the birches generally still green, some near the water I 
yellowish, the sycamore crimson and crimson-tufted, the mountain 
ash a deep orange, the common ash lemon-colour, but many 
ashes still fresh in their peculiar green, those that were dis- 
coloured near the water." What intimacy with moon and stars ! 
" The moon shone upon the waters below Silver How, and 
above it hung (combining with Silver How on one side) a bowl- 
shaped moon, the curve downwards ; the white fields ; glittering 
roof of Thomas Ashburner's house ; the dark yew tree ; the 
white fields, gay and beautiful. William lay with his curtains 
open that he might see it." "O, the unutterable darkness of 
the sky, and the earth below the moon, and the glorious bright- 
ness of the moon- itself ! There was a vivid sparkling streak of 
light at this end of Rydal Water, but the rest was very dark, 
and Loughrigg Fell and Silver How were white and bright, as 
if they were covered with hoar frost. The moon retired again, 
and appeared and disappeared several times before I reached 
home." "A sober starlight evening. The stars not shining 
as it were with all their brightness when they were visible, and 



P GRASMERE 141 

sometimes hiding themselves behind small greying clouds, that 
passed soberly along." "Jupiter was very glorious above the 
Ambleside hills, and one large star hung over the corner of the 
hills on the opposite side of Rydal Water." " When we returned 
many stars were out, the clouds were moveless. . . . Jupiter 
behind. Jupiter at least we call him, but William says we always 
call the largest star Jupiter." 

As at Alfoxden, so here, Dorothy entered deeply into her 
brother's work. Yet the Journals do not show that she gave 
him much direct help except that of an amanuensis — which, 
indeed, in the case of one so marvellously averse from writing 
as Wordsworth, was no small benefit. She was aware of each 
piece of his work, and intensely, lovingly, sympathetic with him 
in it all. Sometimes one feels as if the sympathy were too 
feminine and sentimental to be invigorating. After the manner 
of poets, Wordsworth was fastidious, neurotic, and moody in his 
work ; and one feels, at times, that it would have been good if 
his sister had scolded or laughed at him. " We sat by the fire, 
and did not walk, but read The Pedlar, thinking it done ; but 
W. could find fault with one part of it. It was uninteresting, 
and must be altered. Poor William ! " " We read the first 
part and were delighted with it, but William afterwards got to 
some ugly place, and went to bed tired out." Writing The 
Leech Gatherer "tired " him " to death." "William worked at The 
Leech Gatherer almost incessantly from morning till tea-time. 
... I was oppressed and sick at heart, for he wearied himself 
to death. After tea he wrote two stanzas in the manner of 
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and was tired out." " William did 
not sleep till three o'clock." " William very nervous. After he 
was in bed, haunted with altering TJie Rainboivr There is a 
frequent recurrence of this kind of thing. We feel that it tends 
to discredit the plain living and high thinking at Dove Cottage, 
and that Dorothy took it too seriously. 

If William's moods and difficulties were a trouble, and 
sometimes an unreasonable trouble, to Dorothy's peace, a 
deeper and more real trouble came to her sensitive emotional 
nature through Coleridge. Ever since the fateful moment in 
1796 when she had seen him leap the fence at Racedown, and 
had wondered at his talk and eyes, Coleridge had furnished its 
most powerful human element to Dorothy's life and her brother's. 



142 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

It was Coleridge, we remember, Coleridge at Nether Stowey, 
that drew the Wordsworths into Somerset ; and who could 
forget the trinity that they made there ; the haunted stretch of 
road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden ; the mysterious 
intellectual commerce between Coleridge and Dorothy, invest- 
ing some of the choicest phraseology of The Ancient Mariner 
and Christabel with a doubtful parentage ; who could forget 
the November walk to Lynton, and what came of it ? Cole- 
ridge seemed to have gained no moral strength from his 
sojourn in Germany. He was now nearing thirty, but he 
was not improving in character. Impecuniousness, irresolu" 
tion, desultoriness, and vagrancy, concerted demons of one 
injurious brood, had possession of him and would not let go ; 
and his wonderful genius only quickened their baleful activity. 
When the Wordsworths settled at Grasmere, Coleridge had 
been five years a married man, and the second of his two sons, 
Derwent was born during their first summer at Dove Cottage. 
Yet the marriage, for some reason, was a failure ; it seemed to 
share the blight which had fallen on the Pantisocracy scheme 
of which it had originally formed part. Mrs. Coleridge was the 
mother of Coleridge's children ; but she was little besides to 
him. The dangerous habit of finding his pleasures and com- 
panionships elsewhere than at home he had indulged from the 
beginning, and it grew upon him. We remember how, like a 
hungry-hearted lover, he wrote to Thomas Poole about his 
coming to Stowey. Two anchors, indeed, and two anchors 
only held the poor drifting creature : his feeling for Poole, and 
his feeling for the Wordsworths. By the Wordsworths he was 
held the more firmly ; and in the summer of 1800 he settled 
(if any alighting of his could be called settling) at Greta Hall. 
Thereafter for many years, though with intervals of varying 
length, he was constantly with the Wordsworths, delighting 
them, grieving them, enriching them, preying on them. He 
might turn up any stormy night, wet with the driving rain on 
the Raise or on a shoulder of Helvellyn, and when would he go 
away again ? The dutiful Wordsworth loved him and lamented 
over him — 

" Never sun on living creature shone 
Who more devout enjoyment with us took : 
Here on his hours he hung as on a book, 




SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

BY WASHINGTON AI.LSTON IN 1814 



GRASMERE 14& 

On his own time here would he float away, 

As doth a fly upon a summer brook ; 

But go to-morrow, or belike to-day. 

Seek for him, — he is fled ; and whither none can say." 

" Thus often would he leave our pleasant home, 

[and why not, pray ? Had he not a home of his own, a wife 
and three children, and quite a " position," all the neighbours 
having paid their respects at Greta Hall ?] 

And find elsewhere his business or delight ; 

Out of our Valley's limits did he roam ; 

Full many a time, upon a stormy night. 

His voice came to us from the neighbouring height : 

Oft could we see him driving full in view 

At mid-day when the sun was shining bright j 

What ill was on him, what he had to do, 

A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew." 

Dorothy's Journal is full of Coleridge, full of the old affec- 
tionate appreciation, full also of a keener pain. If Coleridge 
was not at Dove Cottage, or the Wordsworths were not at 
Greta Hall, there were long letters — letters which gave trouble 
and sometimes took away sleep. " At eleven o'clock Coleridge 
came " [this was August 29, 1800], " when I was walking in the 
still clear moonshine in the garden. He came over Helvellyn. 
William was gone to bed, and John also, worn out with his ride 
round Coniston. We sate and chatted till half-past three . . . 
Coleridge reading a part of Chnstabel. Talked much about the 
mountains, etc., etc." A few days later on the night of Grasmere 
Fair : " It was a lovely moonlight night. The moonlight shone 
only upon the village. It did not eclipse the village lights, and 
the sound of dancing and merriment came along the still air. 
I walked with Coleridge and William up the lane, and by the 
church, and there lingered with Coleridge in the garden. John 
and William were both gone to bed and all the lights out." 
Saturday, October, 4 : " Coleridge came in while we were at 
dinner, very wet. We talked till twelve o'clock." Next morning : 
" Coleridge read Christabel a second time ; we had increasing 
pleasure. A delicious morning. . . . Coleridge and I walked to 
Ambleside after dark." On some of these occasions "Sara" 
[Mrs. Coleridge] formed one of the happy group, and there. 



144 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

seemed no separate feeling. But it was far from being all 
happiness. Once, after a little visit to Keswick, Dorothy wrote : 
" Every sight and every sound reminded me of Coleridge — dear, 
dear fellow, of his many talks to us, by day and by night, of all 
dear things. I was melancholy, and could not talk, but at last 
I cured my heart by weeping. . . . O ! how many, many 
reasons have I to be anxious for him." What were they, and 
why was Dorothy so distressed ? Surely we know enough of 
Coleridge to know what they were. Were not all the problems 
about him summed up in the question which, according to 
Wordsworth, was constantly put by the " quiet crew " at Dove 
Cottage — 

" What ill was on him, what he had to do " ? 

W/tat ill was on him ? For one thing, he had bad health ; 
he was rheumatic and neuralgic ; he sometimes had inflammation 
of the eyes. His irregular ways, his long walks in wind and 
rain, were not the best regimen for such a case. Did Dorothy 
and her brother know that he often fought pain and discomfort 
with doses of opium ? Probably they either knew or suspected. 
Anyhow, they knew that Sara was little, and increasingly little, 
to Coleridge, and that Greta Hall was no home. That was bad 
enough. Then what Coleridge " had to do " ; that was another 
tormenting problem. The second part of Christabel was all 
very well ; it was nearly as beautiful, if not so magical, so 
entrancing, as the first part ; but it left the poem a tantalizing 
fragment, and what next ? Nay, even Christabel brought in 
nothing; it was not published until 1816, when Lord Byron's 
insight and kindness drew it from its obscurity. Desultoriness, 
irresolution, vagrancy, reinforced more and more by weak 
health, opium, and unhappiness, or something very near it, in 
married life — they were ruining Coleridge, and his genius could 
do hardly anything to stop them. At thirty what Carlyle said 
of him at nearly sixty was already painfully true : " To the man 
himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble 
endowment ; and to unfold it had been forbidden him. A 
subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous pious sensibility to all 
good and all beautiful ; truly a ray of empyrean light ; — but 
imbedded in such weak laxity of character, in such indolences 
and esuriences as had made strange work with it. Once more, 
the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will." 



GRASMERE 145 

How could such a spectacle, going on under their eyes, fail 
to grieve the Wordsworths ? How, especially, could it fail to 
harrow Dorothy's sensitive soul ? It is impossible to read the 
Grasmere Journals without realizing how vital was the com- 
panionship between Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, and 
how mutual was their sympathy. It was the most natural 
thing in the world, and, of course, the most irreproachable 
thing in the world. Yet it was dangerous, perhaps ; dangerous 
to Dorothy's peace and to Coleridge's ; and if gossip said that 
Mrs. Coleridge was jealous, can we wonder ? 

In April, 1802, Coleridge, looking from Greta Hall at the 
spring sunset, and the new moon in a yellow-green west across 
Derwentwater, groaned out his heart-sickness in his famous 
Dejection ode. Never did the devil of despondency speak in 
more unmistakable tones ; yet how through a poet's lips the 
accents come ! Here is still the incommunicable magic of the 
Ancient Mariner and of Christabel. He sees the dim circle 
within the curve of the crescent moon, and he is haunted by a 
wild and ominous stanza from Sir Patrick Spens — 

" Well ! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made 
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, 
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence 
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade 
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, 
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes 
Upon the strings of this ^olian lute 

Which better far were mute. 
For lo ! the New-moon winter-bright ! 

And overspread with phantom light, 
(With swimming phantom-light o'erspread 

But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) 
I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling 

The coming-on of rain and squally blast." 

O that the omen might be fulfilled, that the tempest would 
burst : perhaps it might stir his stagnant gloom ! When was 
such gloom more sternly portrayed ? — 

" A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief. 
In word, or sigh, or tear." 

Tranquil Nature, the aspect of Nature of which he had 

L 



146 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

sung in his Nightingale poem, can do nothing for him. It is of 
Wordsworth that he thinks as he looks at the beauty of this 
western sky, and it is to Wordsworth (literary fictions notwith- 
standing) that he makes his sad complaint : — 

" In wan and heartless mood 
Have I been gazing on the western sky 



And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye 
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, 

That give away their motion to the stars ; 
Those stars, that glide behind them or between. 

Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen : 
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue ; 
I see them all so excellently fair, 

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are ! " 

It is joy that he lacks, the joy that makes beauty, and must 
be within as well as without. 

" And I must think, do all I can 
That there was pleasure there," 

Wordsworth had written, as he lounged in the Alfoxden grove 
in springtime ; but now Coleridge was telling him that the sad 
heart cannot feel the pleasure — 

" I may not hope from outward forms to win 
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." 

As we read on, we feel that "joy," with its riotous schoolboy 
associations, is hardly the right word for the inward heaven 
which Coleridge has lost. *'0 pure of heart" he cries to his 
brother poet — 

" O pure of heart ! thou need'st not ask of me 
What this strong music in the soul may be ! 
What, and wherein it doth exist. 
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, 
This beautiful and beauty-making power." 

If we must call it joy, it is at least 

" Joy that ne'er was given, 
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour. 
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower. 



GRASMERE 147 

Joy ... is the spirit and the power, 
Which wedding Nature gives to us in dower, 
A new Earth and new Heaven, 
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud — 
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud — 

We in ourselves rejoice ! 
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, 
All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
All colours a suffusion from that light." 

As we go on, we find that it is indeed more than joy, in any- 
vulgar sense of that word, that he has lost — 

" Afflictions bow me down to earth ; 
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ; 

But oh ! each visitation 
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 

My shaping spirit of Imagination." 

Imagination ! Let us think what that word stood for to the 
two poets and critics, and then realize what it was for Coleridge 
to feel that it was growing powerless within him ! 

At last the prediction of the lunar omen is fulfilled : the 
wind comes with its voices, and makes play in the strings of 
the iEolian harp. Like Browning in James Lee's Wife, he 
tries to interpret the wind's messages ; then his sleepless mind 
travels to Dove Cottage, and asks a blessing for its inmates. 
He prays that his friend's "j'oy" may never fail — 

" 'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep : 
Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep ! 

Visit him [so we ought to read it] gentle Sleep ! with wings of healing, 
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, 
May all the stars hang bright above his dwelling. 
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth ! 
With light heart may he rise, 
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, 
Joy lift his spirit, joy attune his voice ; 
To him may all things live, from pole to pole, 

Their life the eddying of his living soul ! 
O simple spirit, guided from above, 
Dear William, friend devoutest of my choice, 
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice." 

Five years later, in another self-pouring, Coleridge told 
what the Wordsworths had been in his life. He had just heard 



I 



148 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Wordsworth read through The Prelude, dedicated to himself, and 
was moved to fresh admiration — admiration at once strengthened 
and embittered by self-pity and self-contempt. He saw Words- 
worth seated — 

" In the choir 
Of ever enduring men." 

His song was immortal — 

" Dear shall it be to every human heart, 
To me how more than dearest ! me on whom 
Comfort from thee, and utterance of thy love, 
Came with such heights and depths of harmony, 
Such sense of wings uplifting, that its might 
Scatter'd and quell'd me, till my thoughts became 
A bodily tumult ; and thy faithful hopes, 
Thy hopes of me, dear friend, by me unfelt ! 
Were troublous to me, almost as a voice, 
Familiar once, and more than musical ; 
As a dear woman's voice to one cast forth, 
A wanderer with a worn-out heart forlorn, 
Mid strangers pining with untended wounds. 
O Friend, too well thou know'st, of what sad years 
The long suppression had benumb'd my soul, 
That, even as life returns upon the drovvn'd, 
The unusual joy awoke a throng of pains — 
Keen pangs of Love, awakening, as a babe 
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ! 
And fears self-will'd that shunn'd the eye of Hope ; 
And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear ; 
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, 
And genius given, and knowledge, won in vain, 
And all, which I had cull'd in wood-walks wild, 
And all which patient toil had rear'd, and all 
Commune with Thee had opened out — but flowers 
Strew'd on my corse, and burnt upon my bier. 
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave ! " 

He must break off this egoistic wailing — Byronic, almost, in 
its last phrasing, but removed from Byronism by its reality 
and intense sincerity — and think of his generous friend — 

" That way no more ! — and ill beseems it me, 
Who came a welcomer, in herald's guise. 
Singing of glory and futurity, 
To wander back on such unhealthful road 
Plucking the poisons of self-harm ! Thou, too, Friend, 






GRASMERE 149 

Impair not thou the memory of that hour 
Of thy communion with my nobler mind 
By pity or grief, already felt too long ! " 

Readers of The Prelude remember how the connection with 
Coleridge runs through it like a golden thread. With this 
mournful echo of Coleridge's self-blame in our ears, we ought 
to listen to Wordsworth's words, which are equally sincere. 
" Of thee," he cries— 

" Of thee, 
Shall I be silent ? O capacious Soul ! " 

When Wordsworth's spirit was wounded and shattered, Cole- 
ridge helped to comfort and build it up — 

" Placed on this earth to love and understand, 
And from thy presence shed the light of love, 
Shall I be mute, ere thou be spoken of ? 
Thy kindred influence [kindred, he means, with Dorothy's, 

of which he had been speaking before] 
Thy kindred influence to my heart of hearts 
Did also find its way." 

Nay, in this his sincerest moment, he could speak of Cole- 
ridge's as a " useful " life, and look forward to its triumph — 

" Oh ! yet a few short years of useful life, 
And all will be complete, thy race be run, 
Thy monument of glory will be raised." 

We can imagine what it must have been for Coleridge to 
hear The Prelude read through from beginning to end. The 
Prelude and The Excursion — in reality, surely, as well in their 
author's purpose, the central works of his genius and his life — 
are as truly a product of Grasmere as the shorter poems which 
reflect its lighter phases. The Prelude, begun, as we remember, 
at the end of the Goslar winter, was completed at Dove Cottage ; 
The Excursion, begun, in a sense, at Racedown, was proceeded 
with at Dove Cottage, though mainly written at Allan Bank. 
The Grasmere years were a period, not of desultory composition, 
but of careful logical planning, coherent theories, and acute criti- 
cism. Of the criticism we shall hear something in a later 
chapter; the fruit of all the rest was gathered during the 
Grasmere years. 

Wordsworth's claim to be a philosophical poet rests, not on 



150 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

this or that passage, this or that attitude of mind, but on his 
ever present, ever operative sense of the Universe, of the whole 
of things, as, in his judgment, the fitting theme of poetry. It 
was the Universe that he meant when he spoke of Man of 
Nature, and of Human Life ; and we misconceive him, we do 
him injustice, if we forget this, and think of him as a narrow, 
limited, local poet. Yet the misconception is most natural — 
natural by reason alike of his success and his failure. He was 
limited and local both by deliberate design and by imperfection, 
the imperfection that waits on the most aspiring genius, the 
most all-embracing design. 

When Wordsworth locked himself in the recesses of Gras- 
mere, he meant to do a large poetic work for the good of his 
fellows. He was conscious, as he said, that " an internal bright- 
ness " had been granted to him, which he was bound to keep 
alive ; that he had something which might be imparted by 
power and effort. In boyhood, and beyond it, his ambition 
had been the ordinary youthful one — 

"to fill 
The heroic trumpet with the Muse's breath ! " 

in other words, he meditated an epic of the traditional character, 
a pageant of heroes, a paraphernalia of battle and conquest, 
a show of garments rolled in blood. But when in his maturity 
he came to Dove Cottage, deliberate self-knowledge told him 
to look elsewhere for immediate subject-matter. A voice 
seemed to say — 

" Be mild, and cleave to gentle things, 
Thy glory and thy happiness be there ! " 

There was to be deliberate and systematic limitation ; the 
gentle things were the pastoral places and folk of Grasmere ; 
but in the limitation there was to be no loss, no depression of 
purpose, no pettiness of result. There would still be the epic 
postulates, aspirations, foes, victory — 

" Bounds to be leapt, darkness to be explored." 

" The love, 
The longing, the contempt, the undaunted quest. 
All shall survive, though changed their office, all 
Shall live, it is not in their power to die." 

Nor was it only epic grandeur that could be made out of 



GRASMERE 151 

Grasmere; but here also, by cottage doors, bare hills, and 
tumbling brooks, was the source of those tremendous abstrac- 
tions in which the human sense of the Universal expresses itself. 
Here came the " affecting thoughts " and *' dear remembrances " 
— the "disturbance," as Wordsworth was fond of calling it — 
which signify that the mind is feeling its way towards " the glory 
of the sum of things," Here, among lonely shepherds, were the 
tracks 

" Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, 

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith ; 

Of blessM consolations in distress ; 

Of moral strength, and intellectual Power ; 

Of joy in widest commonalty spread." 

Here were individuality, conscience, beauty : here, in a word, 
were Nature and Human Nature interacting, not less, but more 
sublimely because the human beings were unsophisticated by 
a complex civilization. Here, folded in this limited actual, was 
the boundless ideal ; here — 

" A simple produce of the common day," 

were Paradise, Elysian Groves, Fortunate Fields, and all the 
conventional delights of poesy. It was to be this poet's mission 
by simple words, free from " poetic diction," " words — 

" Which speak of nothing more than what we are," 

and what the humblest of us are, to win some of the highest 
triumphs of art ; to 

" Arouse the sensual from their sleep 
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
To noble raptures." 

So far, then, we realize the place of the common in Words- 
worth's design ; and so far we see nothing debasing to the 
highest, or impoverishing to the richest, conception of poetry. 
Yet again and again the reader of Wordsworth feels the limita- 
tion as narrowness, the commonness as triviality. He is aware 
of prejudice and partiality ; of austerity where there might 
without offence be more licence ; of severity where there might 
be indulgence ; of bareness where he would fain see tracery and 
foliage. Beautiful, lovable, fascinating, as is that lakeland 
from which he makes his ascent towards the Empyrean, with 



152 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

the emerald of its hillsides quickened by abundance of rain, its 
wind-swept heaths and majestic cloud-scenery, he longs some- 
times for more glowing heat and mellower moons, for nightingale- 
haunted thickets and a fuller human pulse. And there are 
moments even when Wordsworth's Universal seems not wholly 
free from either the illusory or the conventional ; when the 
reader doubts whether it is quite true that the primrose of the 
rock is a moral agent, and is surprised that a poet so often 
" disturbed by the joy of elevated thoughts " should be also the 
poet of some of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and a contented 
supporter of Lord Liverpool and Lord Eldon. 

The plan on which Wordsworth was to work out his great 
results was a simple one. He was to compose a large poem 
called The Recluse, expounding the sensations and opinions of 
a poet living in retirement. This poem was to be preceded by 
an autobiographical poem, TJie Prelude, showing how the 
" Recluse " grew out of the child and the boy. With the 
exception of the First Book, printed in recent editions of 
Wordsworth, The Excursion is all of TJte Recluse that the poet 
accomplished. The two works were figured by Wordsworth 
himself as an ante-chapel leading to a Gothic church. But in 
the design the smaller poems were by no means left out. They 
had " such connection with the main work as gave them claim 
to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, 
primarily included in those edifices." 

To begin with the ante-chapel. The fourteen books of The 
Prelude deal with Wordsworth's development as a poet to the 
stage recorded for us in the conclusion of his Ode on Intimations 
of Immortality, In the last book he portrays the kind of victory, 
the kind of power, to which through all trials he had been led. 
He calls it the " power of a majestic intellect " ; he calls it 
" love " ; he calls it " liberty." He compares it, as it masters 
the darkness of things, to the light of a full moon flooding a 
landscape, such as he had once seen from the top of Snowdon, 
after climbing in the moonless part of the night. He calls 
himself 

" A meditative oft a suffering man " ; 

yet his lofty, and perhaps slightly over-complacent, self-respect 
is the dominant note. To this complacency his education led 
him ; and how he was led appears in the preceding books. The 



GRASMERE 153 

externals, the mere sources, of influence were school ; Cambridge ; 
some London life ; France and her Revolution ; the ministra- 
tion of Dorothy. But the education itself, as unfolded, e.g. in 
Book VIII., Retrospect^ was the great matter. Wordsworth's 
phrase describes its essence : Love of Nature leading to Love of 
Man. He tells us first how Nature, as apart from Man, was all 
in all to him ; and how, as time went on, Humanity also became 
a source of joy. And when that had fully happened, the work 
was accomplished, the victory won. 

The Excursion is the record, in unrelieved blank verse, of a 
long walk made by Wordsworth himself in his own neighbour- 
hood, in company with a humble but intellectual and religious 
man whom he calls The Wanderer. The Wanderer represents 
two most Wordsworthian things — the sober, tranquil joy in the 
contemplation of Nature and Man which the poet himself had 
reached ; and, secondly, that unsophisticated peasant's view of 
the world which Wordsworth considered to be so important and 
so true. In the course of their walk through the Lake country, 
the poet and his companion discuss the incidents, the simple 
and homely incidents, which they encounter : the history of a 
ruined cottage ; a humble funeral ; talks in Grasmere church- 
yard with the parson ; the parson at home ; sunset on the lake. 
As the Wanderer stands for the typical natural man according 
to Wordsworthian ideas, so the whole poem rests on the assump- 
tion that simple country life and society in a remote but beautiful 
neighbourhood is a proper theme for a great poem, because it is 
the surface of profound philosophic depths. 

The antithesis in the early books between the Wanderer and 
the " Solitary " is full of significance. For the Wanderer is 
Wordsworth, the early, and also the healed, restored, Words- 
worth. On the Wanderer, as on Wordsworth, the spirit of Nature 
early fell. Like Wordsworth, the Wanderer early found out 
that Nature is alive. Through the sense of her power, he was 
led to realize the Love shown forth in her, and from vague awe 
he went on to something very near worship. Nowhere in Words- 
worth is the intercourse between Man and Nature more fully 
and characteristically expressed than in the following lines : — 

"He had felt the power 
Of Nature, and already was prepared, 
By his intense conceptions, to receive 




154 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Deeply the lesson deep of love which he, 
Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught 
To feel intensely, cannot but receive. 

" Such was the Boy — but for the growing Youth 
What soul was his, when, from the naked top 
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
Rise up, and bathe the world in light ! He looked — 
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
Beneath him : — Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
And in their silent faces could he read 
Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form 
All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
His animal being ; in them did he live, 
And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
In such access of mind, in such high hour 
Of visitation from the living God, 
Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
Rapt into still communion that transcends 
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! " 

But now, on the other hand, the sceptical, pessimistic, 
Solitary also is Wordsworth, in the second stage of his spiritual 
experience ; Wordsworth shocked, marred, wounded by the spec- 
tacle of humanity astray. Read Book III., called Despondency^ 
and you find the story of a man first delighted, then disgusted, 
with the French Revolution, and left with no faith either in 
religion or in virtue. Read Book IV., called Despondency 
Corrected, and you find the healed and restored Wordsworth 
arguing with the marred and wounded Wordsworth. 

The two books called The Chtirchyard among the Mountains 
are a direct attempt to make the graves of Grasmere churchyard 
yield up some of the deepest secrets of universal human nature. 

In the last book, and especially at the beginning of it, we 
get some of the Wanderer's and Wordsworth's philosophy which 
we could ill afford to do without. We hear of the Universe as 
active, as alive with hope, desire, and effort ; we hear of Man, 
apparently the crown and flower of the Universe, as quick with 
divine movement which unites childhood with age — 



GRASMERE 155 

" Ah ! why in age 
Do we revert so fondly to the walks 
Of childhood — but that there the Soul discerns 
The near memorial footsteps unimpaired 
Of her own native vigour ; thence can hear 
Reverberations ; . . . 

" Do not think 
That good and wise ever will be allowed, 
Though strength decay, to breathe in such estate 
As shall divide them wholly from the stir 
Of hopeful nature." 

Put beside this two other Grasmere poems, the sum and 
climax of Wordsworth's poetical achievement there, the lines 
beginning, " My heart leaps up when I behold," and the Ode on 
Intimations of Immortality^ and our image of Wordsworth at his 
greatest is complete. 



CHAPTER VII 
A SHIPWRECK 

COLERIDGE, though the most important by far of the 
spirits who sojourned with the Words worths at Gras- 
mere, was not their only guest, even in early days. Sometimes 
Coleridge brought with him a friend of whom he was very 
proud, and who hecamQ persona grata at Town End — Humphry 
Davy, fast becoming recognized as the greatest living chemist. 
Davy, born in 1778, was some years younger than Wordsworth 
and Coleridge, and was a prodigy of scientific genius. A 
Cornishman, he was educated at Penzance and Truro. Then 
his bent was discovered ; and, before he carried his talents 
on the inevitable journey of all talents, to London, he was, at 
twenty, made Director of Dr. Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution at 
Bristol. Coleridge got to know Davy after his return from 
Germany; and in 1807 he was writing: "I was much with 
Davey — almost all day." He thought him the most extra- 
ordinary young man he had ever met. Davy used to go to 
Greta Hall to stay with Coleridge, and was, of course, taken 
over the hills to see the Wordsworths. 

Then there were the Clarksons, husband and wife, of whom 
the former was an impassioned opponent of the slave-trade, and 
may share with Wilberforce the credit of its eventual overthrow. 
" Clarkson ! " Wordsworth sang in 1807, when the Bill for 
Abolition became law — 

" Clarkson ! it was an obstinate hill to climb : 
How toilsome — nay, how dire — it was, by thee 
Is known ; by none, perhaps, so feelingly : 
But thou, who, starting in thy fervent prime. 
Didst first lead forth that enterprise sublime. 
Hast heard the constant Voice its charge repeat^ 
Which, out of thy young heart's oracular seat. 
First roused thee. — O true yoke-fellow of Time, 
156 



A SHIPWRECK 157 

Duty's intrepid liegeman, see, the palm 

Is won, and by all Nations shall be worn ! 

The blood-stained Writing is for ever torn ; 

And thou henceforth wilt have a good man's calm, 

A great man's happiness ; thy zeal shall find 

Repose at length, firm friend of human kind ! " 

Clarkson had a farm near Ullswater on which he had built 
a house ; and there were frequent meetings with the Words- 
worths, evenings with a quiet game of cards, or rides about 
the misty hills, Clarkson on his little galloway. Charles Lloyd, 
Coleridge's and Lamb's Birmingham friend, who had settled 
down as a " Laker," lived at Brathay, under Loughrigg, and was 
often at Dove Cottage. 

In 1803, Coleridge took to the Cottage Sir George Beau- 
mont, of Coleorton in Leicestershire, a descendant of the 
dramatist, and a painter of some repute, a noble and generous 
man, if not a great artist ; and a lifelong friendship began 
which has left deep marks both on Wordsworth's biography 
and poetry. Beaumont was born in 1753, and was thus fifty 
when he made Wordsworth's acquaintance. He came to the 
Lakes for their beauty's sake, and was often at Grasmere 
between 1803 and 1806. He loved both Coleridge and Words- 
worth, and was eager to promote their friendship and mutual 
helpfulness. With these things in view, he bought a small 
estate at Applethwaite, near Greta Hall, on which he wished 
the Wordsworths to live. Though they never did so, Words- 
worth kept the estate, making it over to his daughter Dora. 

The friendship with this gracious, wealthy, and gifted man 
and his like-minded wife was one of Wordsworth's best posses- 
sions. Coleorton, four miles south-east of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, 
was a pleasant resort of men of letters and artists. In 1806 
and 1807 Beaumont was building a new house and laying out 
new grounds. He occupied a farmhouse on the estate, and 
this house he lent to the Wordsworths in the winter of 1806-7, 
their family having increased beyond the possibilities of com- 
fortable housing at Dove Cottage. Wordsworth was an adept 
at landscape-gardening ; and at Coleorton he not only walked 
up and down composing poetry as usual, but gave advice as 
to walks, summer-houses, and the like. He wrote to Lady 
Beaumont of the spring-days of 1807 — 



158 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" Lady ! the songs of spring were in the grove 
While I was shaping beds for winter flowers, 
While I was planting green unfading bowers, 
And shrubs to hang upon the warm alcove, 
And sheltering wall ; and still, as fancy wove 
The dream, to time and nature's blended powers 
I gain this paradise for winter hours, 
A labyrinth, lady ! which your feet shall rove. 
Yes ! when the sun of life more feebly shines, 
Becoming thoughts, I trust, of solemn gloom 
Or of high gladness you shall hither bring ; 
And these perennial bowers and murmuring pines 
Be gracious as the music and the bloom 
And all the mighty ravishment of spring." 

Beaumont lived till 1827. He was not a great painter, but 
he was a great patron of art, for from his collection and his 
generosity sprang the National Gallery. 

But of all the guests, the dearest and the most sacred was 
the earliest, the sailor-brother John, who first walked over into 
Grasmere with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who stayed with 
William and Dorothy at Dove Cottage until he had to go to 
join his ship on September 29, 1800. Those nine months — 
"eight blessed months," his brother afterwards called them — 
were long enough to make him a permanent feature of the new 
life ; they were long enough to endear Grasmere to one who, 
albeit a brave and competent sailor, had a poet's sensibility and 
a poet's heart. Dorothy's Journal tells a good deal of John's 
share in the happy summer life, of the walkings and bathings 
and fishings that went on. It tells also of the moment of parting 
" in sight of Ullswater " : " John left us ... It was a fine day, 
showery, but with sunshine and fine clouds. Poor fellow, my 
heart was right sad ! I could not help thinking we should see 
him again, because he was only going to Penrith." 

When John was alone, he specially cared to walk in a fir- 
plantation behind and above the Cottage — that fir-plantation 
towards White-moss which all three liked so well. After he 
was gone the others realized how much he had paced there 
alone, when the wind teased beyond the shelter ; they found a 
path, a quarter-deck path, which could have been worn by none 
other than his sailor's feet. Now that he had gone back to the 
ocean, that silent track seemed eloquent of him and consecrated 
to his memory ; reminiscence was bringing affection within sight 



A SHIPWRECK 159 

of the limits of passion. Emotion was not only " recollected," 
but born "in tranquillity"; imagination and idealization were 
at work. While the brothers were living together, they were 
affectionate brothers, but no more; when one was gone his 
image came "more moving-delicate and full of life" than 
when they were under the same roof. In the fir-wood— hence- 
forward "John's Grove"— William began to realize his brother 
in idealizing him. He seemed the poet, though inarticulate ; 
the man of finer sensibility. 

" In the shady grove 
Pleasant conviction flashed upon my mind 
That, to this opportune recess allured. 
He had surveyed it with a finer eye, 
A heart more wakeful ; and had worn the track 
By pacing here, unwearied and alone. 
In that habitual restlessness of foot 
That haunts the Sailor measuring o'er and o'er 
His short domain upon the vessel's deck, 

When thou had'st quitted Esthwaite's pleasant shore 

Year followed year, my Brother ! and we two 

Conversing not, knew little in what mould 

Each other's mind was fashioned ; and at length, 

When once again we met in Grasmere Vale, 

Between us there was little other bond 

Than common feelings of fraternal love. 

But thou, a Schoolboy, to the sea hadst carried 

Undying recollections ! Nature there 

Was with thee ; she, who loved us both, she still 

Was with thee ; and even so didst thou become 

A silent Poet ; from the solitude 

Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart 

Still couchant, an inevitable ear, 

And an eye practis'd like a blind man's touch. 

Back to the joyless Ocean thou art gone; 

Nor from this vestige of thy musing hours 

Could I withhold thy honour'd name,— and now 

I love the fir-grove with a perfect love." 

A wireless telegraphy of love seemed to play between the 
fir-grove and the ship at sea. 

" While I gaze . . . 

I think on thee 
My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost. 



160 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Nor seldom, if I rightly guess, while Thou, 
Muttering the verses which I muttered first 
Among the mountains, through the midnight watch 
Art pacing thoughtfully the vessel's deck 
In some far region, here, while o'er my head, 
At every impulse of the moving breeze, 
The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound, 
Alone I tread this path ; — for aught I know, 
Timing my steps to thine : and with a store 
Of undistinguishable sympathies. 
Mingling most earnest wishes for the day 
When we, and others whom we love, shall meet 
A second time, in Grasmere's happy Vale." 

These earnest wishes were for something more than a mere 
brief sailor's visit. It was John's purpose to leave the sea as 
soon as he had made a competence, to bid it farewell, and to 
settle at Grasmere, adding his means to the slender capital of 
William and Dorothy. Meanwhile, after the parting on 
Michaelmas Day, 1800, his sea life ran smoothly. He joined 
the Earl of Abergavenny, East Indiaman — "The finest ship 
in the fleet," he wrote to his sister ; but much of his heart was 
left at Grasmere. Just before he sailed in the spring of 1801, 
Wordsworth brought out the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, 
In this, and in his brother's poetry in general, John was deeply 
interested ; he was sensitive to its unpopularity, and confident 
of its essential merit and ultimate success. " Few people," he 
wrote, " read poetry ; they buy it for the name, read about 
twenty lines, and if the language is very fine, they are content 
with praising the whole. Most of William's poetry improves 
upon the second, third, or fourth reading. Now, people in general 
are not sufficiently interested to try a second reading." And 
again, " The poems will become popular in time, but it will be 
by degrees^ " My brother's poetry has a great deal to struggle 
against ; but I hope it will overcome all : it is certainly fo?inded 
upon Nature, and that is the best foundation!^ And finally, 
" I do not give myself the smallest concern about them [Lyrical 
Ballads']. I am certain they must sell." 

Between 1801 and 1804 the Earl of Abergavenny made 
two successful voyages to the far East, and before a third was 
entered on John Wordsworth was put in command of her. 
William saw him once in London, but there was never time for 



A SHIPWRECK 161 

John to go to Westmorland. On one early day in February, 
the Abergavenny left Portsmouth on what the brothers hoped 
would have been John's last voyage. It was ; but not as they 
hoped. On the way down Channel an unskilful pilot was on 
board ; and in the afternoon of February 5 the ship went 
aground off Portland Bill. In a few hours she was a total 
wreck, the greater part of the crew being drowned, and Captain 
Wordsworth going down " with apparent cheerfulness," " in the 
very place and point where his duty stationed him." 

In the dark February days the burden of these heavy 
tidings fell on the little household at Grasmere. There is a 
soul of goodness in things evil ; and the Wordsworths' loss was 
the world's gain. For this tragedy drew from Wordsworth, not 
only two or three of his most beautiful poems, but a note of 
passion deeper and more thrilling than that evoked by any- 
thing else in his life — even marriage, even his love for Dorothy. 
The passion is felt, not only in the verse, but in the intensity of 
the mourning, which gives a passing eloquence to his frigid and 
sapless epistolary style. In that year 1805, when the blow 
came, Wordsworth was in the most perfect maturity of his 
genius. He had finished The Prelude, he had finished the 
Immortality Ode ; it was the year of the Ode to Duty, of The 
Waggoner ; he had just completed some of his most beautiful 
Grasmere work, and his first series of great sonnets. The 
feeling of a great poet at the height of his powers was stirred 
to its deepest depths ; imagination kindled every spark of 
reminiscence into a glowing flame. 

Dorothy wrote to a friend — • " It does me good to weep for 
him. . . . My consolations come to me ... in gusts of feel- 
ing. ... I know it will not always be so. The time will come 
when the light of the setting sun upon these mountain-tops 
will be as heretofore, a pure joy ; not the same gladness — that 
can never be — but yet a joy even more tender. . . . Pure he 
was, and innocent as a child. . . . The stars and moon were 
his chief delight. He made of them his companions when he 
was at sea, and was never tired of those thoughts which the 
silence of the night fed in him." "My poor sister," Words- 
worth wrote to Sir George Beaumont, " and my wife, who loved 
him almost as we did . . . are in miserable affliction, which 
I do all in my power to alleviate ; but Heaven knows I want 

M 



162 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

consolation myself. ... I can say nothing higher of my ever- 
dear brother, than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now 
weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge ; meek, 
affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a 
poet in everything but words." 

" I shall never forget him," he wrote, some days later, " never 
lose sight of him. There is a bond between us yet, the same as 
if he were living, nay, far more sacred, calling upon me to do 
my utmost, as he to the last did his utmost, to live in honour 
and worthiness. . . . Do not think our grief unreasonable. Of 
all human beings whom I ever knew, he was the man of the 
most rational desires, the most sedate habits, and the most 
perfect self-command. He was modest and gentle, and shy 
even to disease ; but this was wearing off. In everything his 
judgments were sound and original ; his taste in all the arts, 
music and poetry in particular . . . was exquisite ; and his eye 
for the beauties of Nature was as fine and delicate as ever poet 
or painter was gifted with, in some discriminations, owing to his 
education and way of life, far superior to any person's I ever 
knew. But alas ! what avails it ? It was the will of God that 
he should be taken away. ... A thousand times have I asked 
myself . . . why was he taken away? . . . Why have we a 
choice and a will, and a notion of justice and injustice enabling 
us to be moral agents ? Why have we sympathies that make 
the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet 
we see dealt about so lavishly by the supreme Governor ? . . . 
Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of 
the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior 
we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things, we have 
more of love in our nature than He has ? ... As to my departed 
brother, who leads our minds at present to these reflections, he 
walked all his life pure among many impure. . . . In prudence, 
in meekness, in self-denial, in fortitude, in just desires and 
elegant and refined enjoyments, with an entire simplicity of 
manners, life, and habit, he was all that could be wished for in 
man ; strong in health, and of a noble person, with every hope 
about him that could render life dear, thinking of, and living 
only for, others — and we see what has been his end ! So good 
must be better ; so high must be destined to be higher." 

Two more sentences, and we may take leave of these 



A SHIPWRECK 163 

elegiacs in prose. "For myself," he wrote, more than a month 
after the catastrophe, " I feel that there is something cut out of 
my life that cannot be restored. . . . But let me stop ! I will 
not be cast down; were it only for his sake, I will not be 
dejected. I have much yet to do, and pray God to give me 
strength and power : his [John's] part of the agreement between 
us is brought to an end, mine continues ; and I hope, when I 
shall be able to think of him with a calmer mind, that the 
remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the 
joy which I had in him living." 

The poetry born of the tragedy is as various as it is 
beautiful. First of all, memory went back to the parting on 
Michaelmas Day, 1800, the parting "in sight of Ullswater" 
commemorated in Dorothy's Journal. The exact spot was near 
Grisdale Tarn, out of which the Grisdale stream flows down 
north-eastward to Patterdale and Ullswater among the wild 
hills between Fairfield and Helvellyn. The ground is high 
enough to be covered with the bright green leaves and pink 
and white flowers of Silene acatclis, the moss campion. Full of 
his sorrow, Wordsworth went back to the place while the plant 
was in flower. At a shepherd's whistle, a buzzard sailed into 
the air; "could it but have lent its wings," he thought pas- 
sionately, "to save those sailors!" Then from the bird with 
its strong and free flight, he turned to the earth-clinging plant, 
and found in it a type of the calmness he needed. His mind 
travelled back over the five years — 

" Here did we stop ; and here looked round 
While each into himself descends 
For that last thought of parting Friends 
That is not to be found. 
Hidden was Grasmere Vale from sight. 
Our home and his, his heart's delight. 
His quiet heart's selected home. 
But time before him melts away. 
And he hath feeling of a day 
Of blessedness to come." 

The next thought was of the shock of the bad news — 

" Full soon in sorrow did I weep, 
Taught that the mutual hope was dust, 
In sorrow, but for higher trust, 
How miserably deep ! 



164 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

All vanished in a single word, 

A breath, a sound, and scarcely heard ; 

Sea — Ship — drowned — Shipwreck — so it came, 

The meek, the brave, the good, was gone ; 

He who had been our living John 

Was nothing but a name." 

Well, and what comes out of it all ? Only the kind of con- 
solation, so sober and so reasonable, which Wordsworth alone 
has made known to us — the kind of consolation which Shelley, 
too, felt when he spoke of Adonais as " made one with Nature." 
The very plant at his feet, humble, beautiful, calm, comforts 
him — 

" From many a humble source, to pains 

Like these, there comes a mild release ; 

Even here I feel it, even this Plant 

Is in its beauty ministrant 

To comfort and to peace. 

" He would have loved thy modest grace, 
Meek Flower ! " 

Such "blessed consolations in distress" cannot be ex- 
plained, cannot be even justified, to a carping and sneering 
scepticism. It is enough that they may be felt by those who 
are pure enough and serene enough to feel them. 

With his beloved daisy, too, he must needs link the thought 
of his sorrow, the very narrative of his loss. 

If John ivoiUd have loved the moss campion, he had loved 
the daisy. And now the daisies grow on his grave at Wyke 
Regis ! — 

" He who was on land, at sea, 
My Brother, too, in loving thee. 
Although he loved more silently. 
Sleeps by his native shore." 

The successful cruises were made ; in the intervals the sailor 
rejoiced in English grass and flowers — 

" But, when a third time from the land 
They parted, sorrow was at hand 
For Him and for his crew. 



" Six weeks beneath the moving sea 
He lay in slumbe quietly ; 
Unforced by wind or wave 



A SHIPWRECK 165 

To quit the Ship for which he died, 
(All claims of duty satisfied ;) 
And there they found him at her side ; 
And bore him to the grave. 

" Vain service ! yet not vainly done 
For this, if other end were none 
That He, who had been cast 
Upon a way of life unmeet 
For such a gentle soul and sweet, 
Should find an undisturbed retreat 
Near what he loved, at last — 

" That neighbourhood of grove and field 
To Him a resting-place should yield, 
A meek man and a brave ! 
The birds shall sing and ocean make 
A mournful murmur for his sake ; 
And Thou, sweet Flower, shalt sleep and wake, 
Upon his senseless grave." 

A yet deeper note was struck out of association with one of 
Sir George Beaumont's pictures. It was of Peel Castle in the 
Isle of Man, painted as in a storm. Wordsworth, as a boy, had 
spent a summer month close to the castle, but had seen it only 
in calm weather. Looking at the turbulent picture, and con- 
trasting it with his own recollections, he, after his fashion, 
extends and moralizes the contrast. It was a contrast never 
far from his central thought, the contrast between the un- 
thinking, non-human estimate of life and Nature on the one 
hand, and the reflective estimate on the other, made when the 
worst of human ill has been faced. It was present to him in 
the grove at Alfoxden ; at Tintern Abbey ; it is the under-note 
of all The Prelude. The picture of Peel Castle in a storm 
brings it sharply out. The death of John Wordsworth, in cir- 
cumstances so tragic — the first keen personal grief in William's 
experience — was fresh " sad music of humanity," only this time 
not "still," but shrill and keen, "wild with all regret." It 
made an epoch ; never again could the poet be what he was 
before. Yet in his poem he is hardly egoistic ; the poem is one 
of art rather than of ethics or autobiography. For art's sake 
primarily, he is thankful that the impression of his childhood, 
made more vivid by illusion — "the light that never was on 
sea or land" — has not been stereotyped by the painter, and 



166 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

imposed on the world as final symbolic truth. " A sea that could 
not cease to smile," " a sky of bliss " — how partial a truth, how 
inadequate to the deepest fact, the deepest beauty, of things ! 
Yet had Wordsworth himself been the painter before his 
sorrows, before this last sorrow, he would have uttered this 
lying half-truth — 

** Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine 
Of peaceful years ; a chronicle of heaven ; — 
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine 
The very sweetest had to thee been given. 

"A Picture had it been of lasting ease, 
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife ; 
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, 
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life." 

But the actual painter's hand has been guided to the true 
picture. The poet hails the symbolism with passionate 
acclamation — 

" This work of thine I blame not, but commend ; 
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore." 

As the moss campion, carpeting the heights by Grisdale 
Tarn had been to the bereaved man a type of restored calm, 
the castle was a type of the indefeasible, the impregnable by 
adversity, by " the fierce confederate storm of sorrow " — 

" And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, 
I love to see the look with which it braves, 
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, 
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves." 

Yet the note on which the poem dies away is far from being 
one of stoical defiance. It is not because the picture shows 
mere unflinching resistance to the blows of fate that it is so 
much to Wordsworth. It is because it shows what Humanity 
adds to Nature, and how from the utmost human pain there is 
release. 

" Welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough ! " 

was Browning's cheery, brusque exclamation. Wordsworth's is 
deeper and more passionate, if more restrained ; and, though 
apparently at war with optimism, not less alive with faith — 



A SHIPWRECK 167 

" Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, 
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind ! 
Such happiness, wherever it be known, 
Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 

" But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, 
And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. — 
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn." 

In October, 1805, Nelson died at Trafalgar; and in the 
next year Wordsworth was moved to put something of his 
character into verse. The conception of " a happy warrior," of 
a fighting man who might yet realize himself at his best, and 
be a kind of philosopher or saint in armour, filled the poet's 
mind and occupied his imagination. But though, as he reflected 
and imagined, he thought much of Nelson, he thought more of 
his brother John. Nelson's private life was too much blurred 
for a poet like Wordsworth to idealize the man completely. 
The philosopher in action was more nearly realized by John, 
who had a warrior's heart, and would fain have fought his 
country's battles. And so, thinking mainly of his brother, the 
poet puts his great question — 

" Who is the happy Warrior ? Who is he 
That every man in arms should wish to be ? " 

and proceeds to answer it so nobly, so sonorously, and with such 
unity and close sequence of thought, that one must quote the 
whole — 

" It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought : 
Whose high endeavours are an inward light 
That makes the path before him always bright : 
Who, with a natural instinct to discern 
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn ; 
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there. 
But makes his moral being his prime care ; 
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
In face of these doth exercise a power 
Which is our human nature's highest dower ; 



168 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Controls them, and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 

Of their bad influence, and their good receives : 

By objects, which might force the soul to abate 

Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; 

Is placable — because occasions rise 

So often that demand such sacrifice ; 

More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, 

As tempted more ; more able to endure. 

As more exposed to suffering and distress ; 

Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. 

— 'Tis he whose law is reason ; who depends 

Upon that law as on the best of friends ; 

Whence, in a state where men are tempted still 

To evil for a guard against worse ill, 

And what in quality or act is best 

Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, 

He labours good on good to fix, and owes 

To virtue every triumph that he knows : 

— Who, if he rise to station of command, 

Rises by open means ; and there will stand 

On honourable terms, or else retire, 

And in himself possess his own desire ; 

Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 

Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ; 

And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait 

For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state ; 

Whom they must follow ; on whose head must fall, 

Like showers of manna, if they come at all : 

Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, 

Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 

A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 

But who, if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 

Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 

Is happy as a Lover ; and attired 

With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired ; 

And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 

In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ; 

Or if an unexpected call succeed, 

Come when it will, is equal to the need : 

— He who, though thus endued as with a sense 

And faculty for storm and turbulence. 

Is yet a soul whose master-bias leans 

To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 

Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 

Are at his heart ; and such fidelity 

It is his darling passion to approve ; 

More brave for this, that he hath much to love ! — 



A SHIPWRECK 169 

'Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high, 
Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye, 
Or left unthought-of in obscurity, — 
Who, with a toward or untoward lot, 
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not, — 
Plays, in the many games of life, that one 
Where what he most doth value may be won : 
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, 
Nor thought of tender happiness betray ; ^ 

Who, not content that former worth stand fast, 
Looks forward, persevering to the last, 
From well to better, daily self-surpast : 
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth 
For ever, and to noble deeds give birth, 
Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame, 
And leave a dead unprofitable name, — 
Finds comfort in himself, and in his cause ; 
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws 
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause : 
This is the happy Warrior ; this is He 
That every Man in arms should wish to be." 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 

IT was to Dove Cottage that Wordsworth brought his wife, 
Mary Hutchinson, in October, 1802. We remember how 
William and Dorothy went over into Yorkshire to fetch her, and 
the Farewell to beloved Grasmere which William wrote before 
they started. There was more romance in the Farewell than in 
the marriage. A cool temperature brooded over the admirable 
arrangement by which Wordsworth, at thirty-two, made his 
Penrith playmate and affectionate lifelong friend into his wife 
and other self. The brother and sister started on their journey 
in July ; and between their departure and the wedding came 
their memorable visit to Calais, — memorable, because, as we 
shall see before this chapter is finished, it stirred Wordsworth 
into a poetry of society and politics, as great, in its way, as any 
of his poetry of Nature. After a little supplementary touring 
by William and Dorothy about England, the marriage took 
place in Brompton Church, near the Hutchinsons' home at 
Gallow Hill in Yorkshire, between Scarborough and Pickering. 
Dorothy seems to have been the only member of the Words- 
worth family who was there, and even she was not present at 
the quiet wedding before breakfast. She contented herself 
with looking from her bedroom window at the party going 
down the avenue to church, and falling on her beloved William's 
bosom when he came back, a married man. One is reminded 
of the Carlyles' wedding-journey, and of the indispensableness 
of " brother John's " company to the bridegroom's happiness, 
when one reads that Dorothy accompanied her brother and his 
wife in the first drive of the honeymoon towards Grasmere. 
They made a placid and happy trio, rolling .along through 
"sunshine and showers, pleasant talk, love and cheerfulness." 

170 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 171 

They walked about, still a trio, during the halt for luncheon ; 
walked in the churchyard at Kirby, " and read the gravestones." 
And so on, through the three days, by Helmsley, and Hawes 
and Garsdale, to Kendal and home. "We arrived at Gras- 
mere," Dorothy writes in her journal, " at about six o'clock on 
Wednesday evening, the 6th of October, 1802. I cannot describe 
what I felt. We went by candle light into the garden, and were 
astonished at the growth of the brooms, Portugal laurels, etc. 
The next day, we unpacked the boxes. On Friday 8, Mary 
and I walked first upon the hillside, and then in John's Grove, 
then in view of Rydal, the first walk that I had, taken with my 
sister." 

It is a homely and temperate story ; but happy marriage, 
fortunately, requires neither romance nor fever. And happy 
marriage William and Mary Wordsworth assuredly achieved. 
Romance or no, the husband of three years' standing who can 
sing of 'his wife as Wordsworth did of his, and with an accent 
of sincerity so clear through the lovely words, is a happy man. 

" She was a phantom of delight : " we need not quote the 
rest. Other poems have much the same burden. In The 
Prelude the poet recurs to the ideas and words of the lyric just 
cited, and thinks of his wife's presence as no ignis fatuiis, but 
an abiding glow, lighting up the heart. 

" She came, no more a phantom to adorn 
A moment, but an inmate of the heart. 
And yet a spirit there for me enshrined 
To penetrate the lofty and the low ; 
Even as one essence of pervading light 
Shines in the brightest of ten thousand stars, 
And the meek worm that finds her lonely lamp 
Couched in the dewy grass." 

Dedicating to her The White Doe of Ryhtone many years 
later in Spenserian stanzas, he recalls happy evenings of 
companionship at Dove Cottage when the three (for Dorothy 
was always there) read Spenser together, and commemorates 
his wife's love of The Doe as its story was unfolded. Nor did 
the deep and tranquil poetry of married life lose itself in the 
marshes of habit or the dry wastes of age. Wordsworth's most 
beautiful lines about his wife were written when he was between 
fifty and sixty, and had been more than twenty years married. 



172 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

The following holds high rank in the anthology of wedded 
love — 

" O dearer far than light and life are dear, 
Full oft our human foresight I deplore ; 
Trembling, through my unworthiness, with fear, 

That friends, by death disjoined, may meet no more ! 

"Misgivings, hard to vanquish or control, 

Mix with the day, and cross the hour of rest j 
While all the future, for thy purer soul, 
With * sober certainties ' of love is blest. 

" That sigh of thine, not meant for human ear, 
Tells that these words thy humbleness offend ; 
Yet bear me up — else faltering in the rear 
Of a steep march : support me to the end. 

" Peace settles where the intellect is meek, 
And Love is dutiful in thought and deed ; 
Through thee communion with that Love I seek : 
The faith Heaven strengthens where he moulds the Creed." 

Mrs. Wordsworth was supposed not to be beautiful, nor did 
even her husband claim perfection for her. 

" Heed not tho' none should call thee fair " 

he exhorted her ; and he bid her rejoice that she was not 
angelic. In an atrabilious mood, Carlyle, who saw her when 
she was growing an old woman, wrote of her as " a small, 
withered, puckered, winking lady." When she was elderly, 
and already, in her close-set cap, looked old, her portrait 
was painted by Margaret Gillies. The picture is a beautiful 
one ; the eyes that look up under thick brows are gentle and 
modest ; the mouth, prematurely sunken, has a comforting 
sweetness. At first the picture was a trial to Wordsworth, 
who would fain have had the likeness of her youth. 

" 'Tis a fruitless task to paint for me 

Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, 
By the habitual light of memory see 

Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade. 
And smiles that from their birthplace ne'er shall flee, 
Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be." 

In time, however, he was able to reach a better construction 




MRS. WORDSWORTH 

liV MAUGAKET (ilLI.lES 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 173 

of the facts, and to realize that his love was poised on nothing 
so frail as mere youth. 

** O, my Beloved, I have done thee wrong, 
Conscious of blessedness, but, whence it sprung, 
Even too heedless, as I now perceive ; 
Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve, 
And the old day was welcome as the young. 
As welcome and as beautiful — in sooth 
More beautiful, as being a thing more holy ; 
Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth 
Of all thy goodness, never melancholy ; 
To thy large heart and humble mind, that cast 
Into one vision, future, present, past." 

De Quincey's well-known impressions of Mrs. Wordsworth in 
1807 must be given for what they are worth. They agree with 
all that we know and can infer from other sources. Standing in 
the kitchen-parlour at Dove Cottage, De Quincey saw two 
ladies enter the room. " The foremost, a tallish young woman, 
with the most winning expression of benignity on her features ; 
advanced to me, presenting her hand with so frank an air, that 
all embarrassment must have fled in a moment before the 
native goodness of her manner. This was Mrs. Wordsworth. 
. . . She furnished a remarkable proof how possible it is for a 
woman neither handsome nor even comely ... to exercise 
all the practical fascination of beauty, through the mere com- 
pensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simplicity the 
most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking 
through all her looks, acts, and movements. Words, I was going 
to have added ; but her words were few. In reality, she talked 
so little, that Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson used to allege against 
her, that she could only say, * God bless you I ' Certainly, her 
intellect was not of an active order ; but in a quiescent, reposing, 
meditative way, she appeared always to have a genial enjoyment 
from her own thoughts ; and it would have been strange indeed 
if she, who enjoyed such eminent advantages of training, from 
the daily society of her husband and his sister, failed to acquire 
some power of judging for herself, and putting forth some 
functions of activity. But undoubtedly that was not her element : 
to feel and to enjoy in a luxurious repose of mind — there was 
her forte and her peculiar privilege. . . . Her figure was 



174 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

tolerably good. In complexion she was fair, and there was 
something peculiarly pleasing even in this accident of the skin, 
for it was accompanied by an animated expression of health, a 
blessing which, in fact, she possessed uninterruptedly." Even a 
slight squint, De Quincey tells us, was no deformity in her face. 
" All faults, had they been ten times more and greater, would 
have been neutralized by that supreme expression of her 
features, to the unity of which every lineament in the fixed 
parts, and every undulation in the moving parts of her counte- 
nance, concurred, viz. a sunny benignity — a radiant graciousness 
— such as in this world I never saw surpassed." 

The Wordsworths' union was perfected by children, all five 
of whom were born at Grasmere. There were three sons and 
two daughters, who came in the following order : — 

John, June i8, 1803. 
Dorothy (Dora), August 16, 1804. 
Thomas, June 16, 1806. 
Catharine, September 6, 1808. 
William, May 12, 1810. 

Only the first two and the youngest lived to grow up : 
Catharine and Thomas both died in 18 12, their loss darkening 
the last year at Grasmere. Katy was drooping in 181 1, and a 
family journey in search of reviving air was made from Gras- 
mere Rectory, into which the Wordsworths had just moved, to 
Bootle, on the Cumbrian coast. Wordsworth has described 
the journey in his Epistle to Sir George Beatimojit. Katy was 
much loved, and was one of her father's many studies in the 
poetry of childhood. He wrote of her in the Bootle year : — 

" Loving she is, and tractable, though wild ; 
And Innocence hath privilege in her 
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes. 
And feats of cunning ; and the pretty round 
Of trespasses, affected to provoke 
Mock-chastisement and partnership in play. 
And, as a faggot sparkles on the hearth, 
Not less if unattended and alone 
Than when both young and old sit gathered round 
And take delight in its activity ; 
Even so this happy Creature of herself 
Is all-sufficient, solitude to her 
Is blithe society, who fills the air 
With gladness and involuntary songs." 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 175 

The visit to Bootle did little good : Katy was marked for 
death; and in June, 1812, death took her. Six months later, 
struck down by the seqiielcB of measles, went her little brother 
Tom, who, in the autumn, used to sweep the leaves from Katy's 
grave. The following year the Wordsworths left Grasmere. 

A sonnet, curiously reminiscent of his little dead daughter, 
and one of the finest of his rare outbreaks of passionate feeling, 
was written by Wordsworth years after. In a lapse of memory 
— a momentary trance of keen emotion — he felt himself turning 
for sympathy to Katy, so long " earth in earth " by Grasmere 
Church. What a lapse, what a treachery of love ! 

" Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind 
I turned to share the transport — Oh ! with whom 
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb. 
That spot which no vicissitude can find ? 
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind — 
But how could I forget thee ? Through what power, 
Even for the least division of an hour, 
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind 
To my most grievous loss ? — That thought's return 
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore. 
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, 
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more ; 
That neither present time, nor years unborn. 
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore." 

Two phases of Wordsworth's Grasmere life remain for more 
heed than we have yet given to them. 

I. Wordsworth, we already realize, was a literary critic, and 
a literary critic of no small importance. By his criticism, quite 
as much as by his poetry — and more, perhaps, than by any 
personal association — he was in touch with others, a member of 
a circle. For the Romantic Revival had its criticism as well as 
its poetry — criticism with which it justified and fortified itself, 
as well as criticism which it provoked, and which tried to hinder 
it. It was a criticism rich and various, a criticism of different 
parentages and different phases, of splendid individuality as 
well as of loyalty to tradition. 

The last word of true eighteenth-century criticism — the 
criticism which began its maturity in Dryden — was spoken in 
]ohnsovi*s Lives of tlie Poets. One may call it on the whole a 
criticism of appraisement accorditig to tradition : writers, writings. 



176 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

were judged from a superior standpoint, and were acquitted or 
condemned by standards set, or supposed to be set, by Aristotle 
and an orthodox succession descending from him. There were, 
of course, modifications of the prevalent tone. The two most 
eminent critics of the school, Dryden and Johnson, diluted 
tradition by large wholesome draughts of common sense. In 
the mid-time of the school's vogue critics appeared like the 
Wartons, who tried to base judgment on admiration rather 
than approval. Addison's criticism was not as wholly " based 
on convention " as Matthew Arnold taught us it was. But even 
the Lives of the Poets, wonderful as is their catholicity, admir- 
able their conscientiousness, and unfailing their reasonableness, 
are judicial — a collection of verdicts and sentences ; and the 
time had come for a new criticism based on appreciation, a 
criticism living, like humanity itself, "by admiration, hope, 
and love." 

Such a criticism was supplied, most conspicuously, by 
Charles Lamb and Coleridge. Both those great critics showed 
themselves wholly free from conventional trammels and 
** Augustan " models, and rediscovered the true classics of 
English literature. They refused to date English poetry from 
the close of the Elizabethan age ; they refused to make any 
kind of apologies for Shakespeare. Charles Lamb rediscovered 
the Elizabethans, felt the human heart beating through them, 
made them speak for themselves afresh to English readers. 
Coleridge brought to the interpretation of Shakespeare — and of 
how many besides ! — the opulent resources of his subtle and 
original mind. Nor, standing not very far from these giants, 
ought William Hazlitt to be overlooked. It is often from the 
lesser men who represent a movement that we learn most 
about the movement itself. And Hazlitt was no petty critic 
or writer ; he was more a critic by profession than Lamb or 
Coleridge ; he brought to his work a whole-hearted devotion, 
and, when his thought was not deflected by petulant moods and 
party-spirit, a broad rational appreciativeness, a fearless candour, 
a wealth of eloquent expression, which are an honour to letters. 

Much of the new criticism might have been called, and was 
considered, mere "mutual admiration." According to that 
other school of critics associated with the Edinburgh, the 
Quarterly^ and to some extent with Blackwood^ the best criticism 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 177 

which England had yet produced was only the self-advertise- 
ment of a clique of incompetent and tiresome poets. The 
criticism of Jeffrey and the rest was not without its merit ; but 
it was, like the characteristic eighteenth-century criticism, 
delivered de haut en bas ; it was criticism of approval or dis- 
approval, not of sympathy and reverence ; and it was spoiled 
by the bad standard of a misused tradition. The " mutual 
admiration " of the other critics, who appreciated Wordsworth 
without prejudice and without flattery, who admired him 
generously without losing sight of any of his short-comings, was 
an insight which posterity has fully ratified. 

The solitary and self-involved Wordsworth had nothing to 
do with mutual admiration. His criticism, partly apologetic, 
partly revolutionary, dealt with abstract principles rather than 
with particular works or particular writers. It falls into rank 
with the critical work of Coleridge, but of Coleridge the literary 
theorist rather than Coleridge the literary critic proper. Indeed, 
as we have already seen, Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, his 
body of poetic theory, in great measure owes its origin to 
Wordsworth's influence, an influence often antagonistic. 

Wordsworth's criticism was the fruit of a nature essentially 
and constitutionally philosophic. He was no keen natural lover 
of books like Lamb or Hazlitt, but an intense believer in the 
unity of apparently divergent things, and acutely jealous for the 
honour of poesy, his own art It is to be found chiefly in 
the preface to the second issue of Lyrical Ballads in 1800; in 
an appendix-note on Poetic Diction to the third issue in 1802 ; 
and in the preface to the first collected edition of the poems 
in 181 5. The last-named has a Supplementary Essay of the 
same date. 

The first preface is the true critical counterpart of Words- 
worth's strongest young poetry. He meant the two to be 
complementary : the poetry was to exemplify the theory, and 
the theory to explain the poetry. The specific objects of the 
1800 preface were two : (i) to defend the style of Lyrical 
Ballads ; (2) to define and defend poetry. 

(i) The defence oi Lyrical Ballads resolves itself into the de- 
fence of that extremely plain diction which so scandalized the 
world. We already know the main lines of the argument : the 
poet chose themes taken from ordinary life and simple humanity, 



178 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

and dealt with them in language formed out of the ordinary 
speech of men and women. The resultant poetry was to be 
coloured by imagination only, and surcharged with emotion- 
Why this choice and method ? Why does the poet go, why 
ought he to go, to common, and especially to rural, life for his 
material and his medium? Because, he maintains, men and 
Nature there are in their interrelation simpler and less sophisti- 
cated than when they have undergone elaborate civilization. 
And the central principle of his art has been that feeling should 
^^ give importance to" action and situation, and not vice versd. 

This principle deserves a moment's consideration. Accord- 
ing to Wordsworth, the poet has for his characteristic endow- 
ment and ^ov^QV feelingy ?>. thought prompted and accompanied 
by emotion, so prompted by emotion as at times to seem 
posterior to it in time — 

"In such high hour 
Of visitation from the living God 
Thought was not ; " 

so Wordsworth himself sang of a moment before thought was 
born. Thus endowed, the poet takes the Universe for his 
province ; but he holds it as God holds it, with an equality of 
regard which transcends all ordinary human notions of size and 
degree. 

" Say not ' a small event ! * Why ' small ' ? 

Costs it more pain that this, ye call 

A ' great event,' should come to pass, 

Than that ? Untwine me from the mass 

Of deeds which make up life, one deed 

Power shall fall short in or exceed ! " 

Browning's words seem to catch and fix Wordsworth's mean- 
ing. It is by virtue of this transcendent, godlike, equalizing 
power of " feeling," that the poet attains to creative imagination, 
that highest potentiality of achievement which all men recognize 
in him, but for which inferior people are apt to mistake the 
sensationalism and grandiosity of writers who lash their dull 
minds into activity which they miscall feeling, and their language 
into diction which they miscall poetic, by stimulants in the shape 
of " great events," distinguished personages, and sentiments in 
full dress. 

(2) Wordsworth defines poetry; or, rather, he discourses on the 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 179 

mission and methods of true poetry. He always considers the 
poet, in spite of the feeling which he claims for him, as a 
philosophic thinker, who recollects, reflects, and selects, and 
who, though his work may indeed be described as a spontaneous 
overflow of feeling, and though his immediate aim is to give 
pleasure, is always more or less directly conscious of aiming at 
truth. In this Wordsworth feels no permanent antithesis : 
Truth, he holds, is Beauty (the source of pleasure) ; the poet is 
the philosopher. Similarly, the common is the nearer manifesta- 
tion of the Divine ; tranquillity is the purest source of emotion. 
In his most appreciative gush, the poet is much of an egoist ; 
when he is most an egoist, he is most truly worshipping his 
Creator. 

Poetry takes its origin, Wordsworth held, from emotion 
recollected in tranquillity. The poet is he who deliberately calls 
up in tranquillity impassioned ideas and situations, and who can 
find no better language to express the result than the ordinary 
speech of men. In doing this with pleasure and for pleasure, 
the poet does nothing beneath the dignity of a high mission. 
For " the native and naked dignity of man " is in no ascetic 
antithesis to pleasure, but is in fact one with it. The pleasure 
which the poet has and gives is philosophic as well as poetic ; 
it arises from his contemplation, his reflective contemplation, of 
the Universe. Nothing in the Universe is alien from him ; not 
even the minuticB of science ; " Poetry is the breath and finer 
spirit of all knowledge." 

But as to the poet, let Wordsworth speak for himself : " Let 
me ask, what is meant by the word ' Poet ' ? What is a Poet ? 
To whom does he address himself? and what language is to be 
expected from him ? He is a man speaking to men ; a man, it 
is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm 
and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, 
and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be 
common among mankind ; a man pleased with his own passions 
and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the 
spirit of life that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar 
volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the 
Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does 
not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition 
to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they 



180 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

were present ; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, 
which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by 
real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy 
which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the 
passions produced by real events, than anything which, from 
the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accus- 
tomed to feel in themselves : whence, and from practice, 
he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing 
what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and 
feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his 
own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement." 

Where, in this conception, is the place for metre and 
rhyme, the formal dijferenticB of poetry ? Wordsworth's defence, 
so to call it, of metre and rhyme is subtle and interesting. If 
the poet is to feel, think, and write only as a specially intense 
ordinary person, and to express himself in language which is 
essentially identical with the language of prose, why should he 
hamper or artificialize himself by what makes his expression 
specifically different from that of prose ? 

Wordsworth gives three reasons. First, the somewhat 
surprising one that verse is a restraint on the vagaries and 
possible excesses of passion. This sounds paradoxical ; for we 
are accustomed to think of verse as the specifically appropriate 
medium of impassioned feeling, and as chosen for the very 
reason that it is free from the fetters of prose. But, says 
Wordsworth, passionate feeling and the excitement which is 
inseparable from the design of poetry are kept within bounds by 
the regularity of metre. And this is not all. Metre not only 
gives regularity to language, but " divests language, in a certain 
degree, of its reality," and throws " a sort of half-consciousness 
of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition." This 
touch of unreal glamour given by verse enables us to bear, e.g.^ 
pathos, which would be intolerable in the hard everyday truth- 
fulness of prose. " This opinion," Wordsworth holds, " may be 
illustrated by appealing to the reader's own experience of the 
reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of the dis- 
tressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe or the Gamester ; while 
Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act 
upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure — an effect 
which, in a much greater degree than might be imagined, is to 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 181 

be ascribed to small, but continual and regular impulses of 
pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement." Surely this 
distinction between the " pain " with which we shut Clarissa^ 
and the " pleasure " with which we see the curtain fall on Lear 
or Othello is, to say the least of it, disputable ; but the important 
point is to realize how much stress is laid by the austere Words- 
worth on pleasure as the end of poetry ; and this association 
between metre and pleasure is to be regarded as the second line 
of his defence. 

The third line of defence is equally subtle, and Wordsworth 
does little more than hint at it. Metre and rhyme are of value, 
he says, because one element of the " pleasure " given by poetry 
is the sense of unity in diversity which is conveyed by the verse- 
form. Wordsworth, in fact, seems to regard the world of emotion 
and passion which confronts the poet as so imperfectly cosmic 
that he must impose upon it the forms of his own mind — forms 
expressed in the "regularities " of verse, if he is to " enjoy " it, 
as a poet may and should. 

In all this Wordsworth seems to be feeling after a theory of 
imagination such as he expounded in the preface and essay of 
1815. That theory we may briefly notice here, before parting 
with Wordsworth the critic. 

Imagination is one of the hardest words in the language ; 
but all literary and artistic critics seem to understand by it that 
intellectual faculty by which for artistic purposes the data of 
perception and recollection are arbitrarily modified or changed 
by the percipient or recollecting individual. It is the individu- 
ality as well as the artistic end of the faculty, which distinguishes 
imagination from mere knowledge, as Kant thought of know- 
ledge ; and it is the arbitrariness of its method which makes 
men speak of imagination as creative. 

As creative, and therefore Divine, Wordsworth constantly 
spoke of imagination in his poetry. In his Preface of 181 5, he 
grapples the matter in prose. Imagination, with which he 
conjoins "fancy," is one of the poet's faculties — the faculty 
which " modifies," " creates," and " associates " ; and it is dis- 
tinguished from " invention," which " composes " characters out 
of the data of observation and introspection. The modifying 
energy of imagination (which he elsewhere calls an " endowing " 
power) is governed " by fiixed laws " ; but Wordsworth does not 



182 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

tell us what they are. He prefers to give instances of the 
energy. When Shakespeare speaks of the samphire-gatherer 
"hanging" on the cliff, or when Milton speaks of a far-off fleet 
seen " hanging " in the clouds, or again, when Wordsworth himself 
speaks of the stock-dove "brooding" over his own voice, or 
suggests that the cuckoo is a voice rather than a bird, the poet 
in each case is exercising imagination as a modifying power. 
A plain man would say that all these were instances simply of 
happy or beautiful metaphor. And again, in the noble images 
which expound the leech-gatherer's figure in Resolution and 
Independence : — 

" As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie 
Couched on the bald top of an eminence, 

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf 
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself, 
Such seemed this man : 



Motionless as a cloud the old man stood, 

That heareth not the loud winds when they call ; " 

the plain man is content to find a series of admirable similes. 
But Wordsworth explains that " in these images, the conferring, 
the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, 
immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunc- 
tion." The Imagination takes life from the sea-beast and gives 
it to the stone ; while the leech-gatherer himself is half-killed 
so as to make him seem almost as dead as the stone. 

Imagination, says Wordsworth, creates in innumerable ways ; 
chiefly, perhaps, by "consolidating numbers into unity, and 
dissolving and separating unity into number." Thus in 
Milton's lines about the Messiah — 

" Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints 
He onward came : far off his coming shone," 

Wordsworth finds that the retinue of saints, and the Person 
of the Messiah Himself, are lost almost and merged in the 
splendour of that indefinite abstraction, " His coming ! " Here 
the critic is perhaps not quite so convincing as when he quotes 
without analysis from King Lear the two lines — 

" I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness, 
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you daughters ! " 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 183 

as an instance of "human and dramatic Imagination." And 
indeed, in his whole treatment of imagination Wordsworth 
is disappointing ; he undertakes more than he carries out ; 
his analysis breaks down and falls short. By the idea of 
" Fancy " he seems less overcome ; though he is perhaps less 
lucid in his account of it. He compares and contrasts it with 
imagination ; and the substance of his meaning apparently 
is that fancy, unlike imagination, cannot change, except by 
slight superficial modification, the data given to her; their 
substance, so to call it, remains unalterable by so slight and 
tricksy a power ; yet she can move her data about like puppets, 
and can play upon them with capricious and surprising lights 
which have an effect that may be almost creative. Moreover, 
fancy "ambitiously aims at a rivalship with imagination, and 
imagination stoops to work with the materials of fancy." 
Such proceedings and interchanges, the plain man feels, are too 
complicated, are at once too definitely and indefinitely con- 
ceived, to help the critic or reader very far along his way. 

Wordsworth's best friends and most sympathetic expounders 
found much to object to in his theories. Coleridge, who loved 
psychological jargon, fell foul of both the " poetic diction " and 
the fancy-and-imagination doctrines. So did Hazlitt and 
Leigh Hunt from different points of view ; while De Quincey 
had no difficulty in showing that Wordsworth's attitude towards 
the " diction " of verse was too polemical to be quite sound. 

2. The other capital interest of Wordsworth in the Grasmere 
days was the condition of English and European politics. We 
remember how in his youth his whole nature was played upon 
like a musical instrument by the French Revolution, and how 
he was thrown into moral paralysis and practical altruism by 
his country's active hostility to France in 1793. Sir John Seeley 
has pointed out that we make a mistake when we regard the 
brief Peace of Amiens in 1802-3 as a mere interruption in a 
single and homogeneous war. He has reminded us that 
between 1793 and 181 5 England and Europe were in arms 
against two quite different revolutions : first, the French 
Revolution ; and, secondly, the Napoleonic Revolution. Roughly 
speaking, the French Revolution was attacked between 1793 
and 1802; and the Napoleonic between 1803 and 1815. If, in 
one sense. Napoleon was the product of the French Revolution, 



184 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

in another sense he was its enemy and destroyer ; and it 
was thus quite logically justifiable to wish well to the French 
Revolution and afterwards to breathe out threatenings and 
slaughter against Napoleon. This, at all events, was what 
demonstrably happened in Wordsworth's case. There was a 
very real sense in which his sympathy with France, struggling 
against aristocratic and clerical abuses, was one with his 
sympathy with Europe, struggling against Napoleon. In both 
struggles the battle-cry was liberty ; and for liberty Words- 
worth, between Trafalgar and Waterloo, lost some of his passion. 
Those who think of him as Browning's Lost Leader, who think 
of him as " breaking from the van and the freemen " " and sink- 
ing to the rear and the slaves," think of him — to say the least of 
it — inaccurately. He did something very different. 

The anti-Napoleonic struggle itself was not homogeneous. 
It was partly a resistance of governments to a destroying and 
usurping government ; partly a passionate assertion of national 
independence. It was national independence — or, as men 
since Wordsworth's day have taken to calling it, " nationality " 
— that asserted itself in those Spanish and German uprisings 
which, more than any diplomacies or coalitions, brought 
Napoleon at last to his knees. To Wordsworth Napoleon 
appeared chiefly as a robber of independence. He has vividly 
painted for us his horror and anger as the significance of the 
First Consul and French Emperor became clear to him — 

" When, finally to close 
And seal up all the gains of France, a Pope 
Was summoned in to crown an Emperor ; " 

and when indignation had to serve instead of hope. But 
his anti-Napoleonic passion was not fully kindled until the 
tyrant ravished Switzerland of her freedom. Thenceforward 
he was to Wordsworth a criminal rather than a conqueror. 

A curiously vital link binds Wordsworth's politics with his 
poetry. At Dove Cottage one May afternoon in 1802, Dorothy 
read Milton's sonnets to her brother. He had long known 
them, but had never before realized their power, their " dignified 
simplicity and majestic harmony." He at once "took fire," 
and, before he slept that night, had written two or three sonnets. 
If they were not his first, they were the first that were more 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 185 

than experiments. Of these, only one survives ; but it is a 
memorable one. It was the turning-point of the struggle ; the 
Treaty of Amiens had been two months signed ; Bonaparte 
had been three years First Consul and was becoming a portent 
in men's minds. Wordsworth was beginning to speculate 
about him, beginning to fear him ; but he had not yet made 
up his mind about him. He dedicated to him his first 
tentative sonnet. 

" I grieved for Bonaparte, with a vain 
And an unthinking grief ! The tenderest mood 
Of that Man's mind — what can it be ? what food 
Fed his first hopes ? What knowledge could he gain ? 
'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
The Governor who must be wise and good, 
And temper with the sternness of the brain 
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. 
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees : 
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
Of the mind's business : these are the degrees 
By which true Sway doth mount ; this is the stalk 
True Power doth grow on ; and her rights are these." 

Already, in this somewhat irregular piece, Wordsworth 
showed what he was to be as a sonneteer ; here already are the 
massiveness, the unity, the seriousness, the sense of climax and 
finish, — above all, the pregnant suggestiveness of immortal 
phrase, which make the sonnet what at its best it is. But, 
notwithstanding the Miltonic fire which he felt burning within 
him, he can have had no prevision of the great place which his 
sonnets were to hold in the sum of his work. Nor can he have 
realized the significance of the coincidence which made Napoleon 
the theme of his first efforts. His appreciativeness of the sonnet 
and his sense of its fitness to some, at least, of his poetic moods, 
are expressed in the two sonnets on the sonnet which are too 
familiar for quotation ; that which speaks of the form's narrow 
bounds as indeed " no prison," and of himself as finding therein 
" brief solace " under " the weight of too much liberty ; " and 
that other, composed much later, in a walk by Rydal lake, in 
which Wordsworth defends the sonnet on the ground of its 
glorious history — the sonnet of Petrarch, Tasso, Camoens, 
Dante ; of Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton. He was to use it, 



186 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

exquisitely and nobly, for various purposes ; for delicate land- 
scape-painting and for intimate lyrical out-breathings ; but 
chiefly for poetry of historical sense and social, ecclesiastical, 
and political conviction ; above all, for the passion of liberty 
and national independence. Therefore it was not " idle " that 
his first sonnets were about Napoleon. 

It was the Peace of Amiens that made it possible for the 
Wordsworths to cross to Calais in the summer of 1802, before 
William's marriage. The poet's mind was full of international 
politics and aglow with patriotism ; and he used his newly 
discovered sonnet-medium freely. Looking westward at the 
setting Venus over England, he sounds greatly the note of 
patriotism, daring to take the glorious star for type of his 
country's glory — 

" Fair star of evening, splendour of the west, 
Star of my Country ! on the horizon's brink 
Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink 
On England's bosom ; yet well pleased to rest, 
Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest 
Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, 
Should'st be my Country's emblem ; and should'st wink. 
Bright star ! with laughter on her banners, dress'd 
In thy fresh beauty. There ! that dusky spot 
Beneath thee, that is England ; there she lies. 
Blessings be on you both ! one hope, one lot, 
One life, one glory ! — I, with many a fear 
For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, 
Among men who do not love her, linger here." 

It was the first time he had been in France since 1792 ; and 
in the ten years the changes there had been greater than any 
changes in his own mind or sympathies. He despised the 
servility of the fickle French towards the First Consul. W/uii 
hardship had it been to wait an hour f he puts it to them ; having 
destroyed monarchy by so terrible a stroke, could they nol 
have given " equality " a longer trial, so that if there was to be 
monarchy again, it should at least be monarchy rooting deeply 
in well-tried affections ? About Calais the people seemec 
indifferent to the mushroom-monarch. 

" I have bent my way 
To the sea-coast, noting that each man frames 
His business as he likes," 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 187 

though it was the First Consul's birthday, and France was 
holding high festival. The memories of the Revolution in 
which the young poet so passionately believed, had dwindled 
to mocking echoes. He remembered how, in 1790, he had 
heard and seen the hailing of Liberty near Calais — 

" From hour to hour the antiquated Earth 
Beat Uke the heart of Man : songs, garlands, mirth, 
Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh ! " 

Now, in 1802 — 

" Sole register that these things were, 
Two solitary greetings have I heard, 
Good-morrow, Citizen ! a hollow word, 
As if a dead man spake it ! " 

The Corsican was the slayer of liberty everywhere. Four 
years previously he had seized the proud Republic of Venice 
as a conqueror, and had handed her over to Austria. Words- 
worth sang her dirge in the great sonnet which commemorated 
her as " the eldest child of Liberty." And now Bonaparte was 
showing himself the abettor of slavery in its vulgarest form — 
the buying and selling of the African negro. The heroic 
"Toussaint I'Ouverture" had cleared the horror out of Hayti, 
and won San Domingo for libertarian France. At the Peace 
of Amiens Napoleon re-imposed slavery on San Domingo, and 
Toussaint, resisting the edict, was seized and thrown into a 
French dungeon even after he had at last yielded. Words- 
worth, not knowing the place of his fate, but only that the 
tyrant's foot was on his neck, bids him to " wear a cheerful 
brow " in his chains, and to live in the greatness of his soul. 

" Thou hast left behind 
Powers that will work for thee : air, earth, and skies ; 
There's not a breathing of the common wind 
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; 
Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind." 

More and more clearly his own country stood out in the 
poet's imagination as the symbol and exemplar of the liberty 
ivhich was passing away from France and the Continent. And 
it was a liberty of genuine morality ; the freedom of the self- 
possessed and self-possessing soul. But was the soul sound ? 
When Wordsworth re-crossed the Channel and contrasted the 



188 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" vanity and parade " of London and other English towns with 
the look of quiet and desolation in France, he trembled ever 
for England. Was not the canker of plutocracy already eatinc 
at her heart ? 

" The wealthiest man among us is the best. 
Plain living and high thinking are no more." 

It was now, in this moment of deep indignation and anxious 
fear, that he wrote sonnets — three of which are perhaps the 
greatest even he ever wrote — sonnets of commemoration and 
challenge, not without echo surely in the thunders of Trafalgar 
and Waterloo, which are too great to be omitted or curtailed 
in any book that would show Wordsworth as he was. 

" Milton ! thou should'st be living at this hour : 
England hath need of thee : she is a fen 
Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen, 
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 
Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ; 
Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart : 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." I 

" It is not to be thought of that the Flood 
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea 
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity 
Hath flowed, 'with pomp of waters, unwithstood, 
Roused though it be full often to a mood 
Which spurns the check of salutary bands. 
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands 
Should perish ; and to evil and to good 
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung 
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old : 
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held. — In every thing we are sprung 
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold." 

" When I have borne in memory what has tamed 
Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart 
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 189 

The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed 

I had, my Country ! — am I to be blamed ? 

Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art, 

Verily, in the bottom of my heart. 

Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. 

For dearly must we prize thee ; we who find 

In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ; 

And I by my affection was beguiled : 

What wonder if a Poet now and then, 

Among the many movements of his mind, 

Felt for thee as a lover or a child ! " 

It is easy to understand how Wordsworth greeted the 
Spanish national uprising in which at last the soul oi Europe 
began to revive, and how he hailed England's intervention in 
the Peninsula. The great year was 1808; Wordsworth moved 
from the too narrow bounds of Dove Cottage into the more 
spacious Allan Bank in June ; and there, in his inland dale he 
stood, eagerly watching the sunrise of liberty. The newspaper 
was brought from Keswick : the poet would often go to meet 
it at the top of the Raise at two in the morning. In August 
Vimeiro was fought ; but, as the autumn deepened, the prospect 
grew clouded. Wordsworth felt that the ministries of Nature 
about him in Westmorland made his political insight clear. 

" Not 'mid the world's vain objects that enslave 
The free-born Soul — that World whose vaunted skill 
In selfish interest perverts the will, 
Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave — 
Not there ; but in dark wood and rocky cave. 
And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill 
With omnipresent murmur as they rave 
Down their steep beds, that never shall be still : 
Here, mighty Nature ! in this school sublime 
I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain ; 
For her consult the auguries of time, 
And through the human heart explore my way ; 
And look and listen — gathering, whence I may, 
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain." 

As he listened to the raving of the autumnal wind, the poet, 
like Shelley afterwards, heard in it not only a dirge, but a 
promise and a prophecy, telling of " bright calms " that 
should succeed. 

He wrote not sonnets only that autumn and winter at Allan 



190 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Bank. The splendid beginning of British intervention in the 
Peninsula, marked by the battle of Vimeiro, was spoiled by the 
so-called Convention of Cintra, by which the French were 
conducted scathless out of Portugal at British expense. The 
English nation was astonished and indignant at such apparent 
pusillanimity, and a court of inquiry was held. Wordsworth, 
as he wrote to Southey, was filled with detestation and abhor- 
rence of the Convention. The authors of it showed their failure 
to understand the essential novelty of the situation — namely, the 
substitution of national for merely governmental opposition to 
Napoleon. Napoleon himself, naturally enough, " had committed 
a capital blunder in supposing that when he had intimidated 
the Sovereigns of Europe he had conquered the several nations." 
But it was disgraceful that a " child of Liberty " like England 
should make the same mistake. "As far as those men [the 
authors of the Convention of Cintra] could, they put an extin- 
guisher upon the star which was then rising." 

In these winter months Wordsworth relieved his mind by 
writing a pamphlet, which was published in the spring of 
1809. It had one of the interminable titles beloved of serious 
and solid persons in those days, which in this case is worth 
citing, because it summarizes the substance of the essay. 
" Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, 
to each other, and to the common enemy at this crisis, and 
specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra ; the 
whole brought to the test of those principles by which alone 
the independence and freedom of nations can be preserved or 
recovered." 

" The independence and freedom of nations : " the essay glows 
with this theme like a fire fed with rich fuel. Wordsworth 
knew that he must seem inconsistent : in 1793 he had been 
shaken and soured by the hostility of England to France ; 
why was he now so eager to push hostility to France beyond 
the limits of humanity and worldly policy ? Because, he 
answered, in the second war the persons were changed, but the 
struggle, the enemy, were the same in both conflicts. The 
struggle was for liberty ; the enemy was " the spirit of selfish 
tyranny and lawless ambition." Napoleon was not really 
France ; the French government, even the French army, was 
not the French people. Napoleon's power, though parading 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 191 

as that of the nation, was as evil a thing, wherever it 
established itself, as any monarchical or aristocratic abuse 
ot the ancien regime. 

Wordsworth's horror at the Convention of Cintra was thus 
not only consistent, but homogeneous, with his horror at the 
war which began in 1793 ; and his nature was as passionately 
stirred in the one case as in the other. Only in his anti- 
Napoleonic crusade he was full of wholesome hope, and felt 
himself supported by the best sentiment of his fellow-citizens. 
He was, as he expressed it, drawing out "to open day the 
truth from its recesses " in their minds. He was standing for 
" moral " against ** mechanic " power ; for soul against body ; for 
"the purest hopes" against "purblind calculation"; for the 
" mighty engines of Nature " against the " base and puny tools 
and implements of policy." And seldom has a finer hymn of 
nationality been sung than in these prose sentences : " There 
is no middle course : two masters cannot be served ! Justice must 
either be enthroned above might, and the moral law take place 
of the edicts of selfish passion ; or the heart of the people, 
which alone can sustain the efforts of the people, will languish ; 
their desires will not spread beyond the plough and the loom, 
the field and the fireside ; the sword will appear to them an 
emblem of no promise ; an instrument of no hope ; an object 
of indifference, or disgust, or fear. Was there ever — since the 
earliest actions of men which have been transmitted by affec- 
tionate tradition, or recorded by faithful history, or sung to the 
impassioned harp of poetry — was there ever a people who 
presented themselves to the reason and the imagination, as 
under more holy influences than the dwellers upon the Southern 
Peninsula ; as roused more instantaneously from a deadly 
sleep to a more hopeful wakefulness ; as a mass fluctuates 
with one motion under the breath of a mightier wind ; as 
breaking themselves up, and settling into several bodies, in more 
harmonious order ; as reunited and embattled under a standard 
which was reared to the sun with more authentic assurance of 
final victory ? Let the fire, which is never wholly to be extin- 
guished, break out afresh ; let but the human creature be 
roused ; whether he have lain heedless and torpid in religious or 
civil slavery — have languished under a thraldom, domestic or 
foreign, or under both these alternately — or have drifted about 



192 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

a helpless member of a class of disjointed and feeble barbarians 
— let him rise and act ; and his domineering imagination, by 
which from childhood he has been betrayed, and the debasing 
affections which it has imposed upon him, will from that 
moment participate the dignity of the newly ennobled being 
whom they will now acknowledge for their master. . . . Still 
more inevitable and momentous are the results, when the indi- 
vidual knows that the fire ... is not less living in the breasts of 
his associates ; and sees the signs and testimonies of his own 
power, incorporated with those of a growing multitude, and not 
to be distinguished from them, accompany him wherever he 
moves. ... If the object contended for be worthy and truly 
great ... if cruelties have been committed upon an ancient and 
venerable people, which ' shake the human frame with horror ' ; 
if not alone the life which is sustained by the bread of the 
mouth, but that — without which there is no life — the life in the 
soul, has been directly and mortally warred against . . . then 
does intense passion, consecrated by a sudden revelation of 
justice, give birth to those higher and better wonders which I 
have described ; and exhibit true miracles to the eyes of men, 
and the noblest which can be seen." Before the poet's imagina- 
tion hung the vision of the Spanish Power in two hemispheres, 
poised, in an awful instant of destiny, and with one hope of 
salvation, between an effete monarchy and a new tyranny. 
England to the rescue, could but England be true to herself! 
" Reflect upon what was the temper and condition of the 
Southern Peninsula of Europe — the noble temper of the people 
of this mighty island, sovereigns of the all-embracing ocean ; 
think also of the condition of so vast a region in the Western 
continent and its islands ; and we shall have cause to fear that 
ages may pass away before a conjunction of things, so marvel- 
lously adapted to ensure prosperity to virtue, shall present itself 
again. It could scarcely be spoken of as being to the wishes of 
men — it was so far beyond their hopes. The government which 
had been exercised under the name of the old Monarchy of 
Spain — this government, imbecile even to dotage, whose very 
selfishness was destitute of vigour, had been removed ; taken 
laboriously and foolishly by the plotting Corsican to his own 
bosom ; in order that the world might see ... to what degree 
a man of bad principles is despicable— though of great power — 



THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 193 

working blindly against his own purposes." The opportunity 
for beneficent intervention was made as much by the stupidity as 
by the genius of the tyranny. " It was a high satisfaction to 
behold demonstrated ... to what a narrow domain of know- 
ledge the intellect of a Tyrant must be confined ; that, if the gate 
by which wisdom enters has never been opened, that of policy 
will surely find moments when it will shut itself against its 
pretended master imperiously and obstinately. To the eyes of 
the very peasant in the field, this sublime truth was laid open — 
not only that a Tyrant's domain of knowledge is narrow, but 
melancholy as narrow ; inasmuch as — from all that is lovely, 
dignified, or exhilarating in the prospect of human nature — he 
is inexorably cut off ; and therefore he is inwardly helpless 
and forlorn." 

In all this there is surely no " reaction " ; there is nothing 
which the most modern " Liberalism " need disavow. Two 
years after the Convention of Cintra, while Wellington was 
plodding on through the Peninsular campaigns, with the issue 
doubtful and opposition keen, an eminent " Jingo " of his day. 
Sir Charles Pasley, of the Royal Engineers, wrote a pamphlet 
on Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, 
which moved Wordsworth to a rejoinder. Pasley maintained 
that Britain, if she was to overthrow Napoleon, ought to follow 
his example by winning a basis of power on the Continent. 
Against this view Wordsworth raised again his standard of 
national independence, of popular self-government. He rested 
his hopes, he wrote to Pasley, "with respect to the emancipa- 
tion of Europe, upon moral influence, and the wishes and opinions 
of the respective nations." " You treat," he went on, " of conquest 
as if conquest could in itself, nakedly and abstractedly con- 
sidered, confer rights. If we once admit this proposition, all 
morality is driven out of the world. ... I think there is nothing 
more unfortunate for Europe than the condition of Germany 
and Italy in these respects [their divided state]. Could the 
barriers be dissolved which have divided the one nation into 
Neapolitans, Tuscans, Venetians, etc., and the other into 
Prussians, Hanoverians, etc., and could they once be taught to 
feel their strength, the French would be driven back into their 
own land immediately. I wish to see Spain, Italy, France, Ger- 
many formed into independent nations. . . . England requires 
o 



194 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

as you have shown so eloquently and ably, a new system 
of martial policy ; but England, as well as the rest of Europe, 
requires what is more difficult to give it, — a new course of 
education, a higher tone of moral feeling, more of the grandeur 
of the imaginative faculties, and less of the petty processes that 
would manage the concerns of nations in the same calculating 
spirit with which it would set about building a house." 

Two sonnets, both written in 1811, may fix for us more per- 
manently than any prose extracts the key of Wordsworth's 
politics in this, their anti-Napoleonic strain. 

" The power of Armies is a visible thing. 
Formal, and circumscribed in time and space ; 
But who the limits of that power shall trace 
Which a brave People into light can bring 
Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating 
By just revenge inflamed ? No foot may chase, 
No eye can follow, to a fatal place 
That power, that spirit, whether on the wing 
Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind 
Within its awful caves. — From year to year 
Springs this indigenous produce far and near ; 
No craft this subtle element can bind, 
Rising like water from the soil, to find 
In every nook a lip that it may cheer." 

" Here pause ; the poet claims at least this praise. 
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope 
Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope 
In the worst moment of these evil days ; 
From hope, the paramount du(y that Heaven lays, 
For its own honour, on man's suffering heart. 
Never may from our souls one truth depart — 
That an accursed thing it is to gaze 
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye ; 
Nor — touched with due abhorrence of f/ieir guilt 
For whose dire ends tears flow, and blood is spilt. 
And justice labours in extremity — 
Forget thy weakness, upon which is built, 
O wretched man, the throne of tyranny ! " 

If political reaction came, if Wordsworth ever became in 
any sense a " lost leader," it was in a later chapter of his life. 



CHAPTER IX 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

WORDSWORTH'S tract on the Convention of Cintra was 
revised and prepared for the press by a young man of 
letters whom he had not known very long, but whose gifts he 
already rated very highly. Thomas de Quincey is, and must 
always remain, one of the most vivid and remarkable of all the 
members of Wordsworth's circle, though it seems doubtful where 
he may ultimately stand among English prose classics. As to 
his early discipleship of Wordsworth, at all events, and his 
competence to understand him and to mediate between him and 
intellectual England, there can be no doubt. De Quincey, a 
strange, delicate, wayward, clever, well-read boy, with precocious 
skill in Greek, came across Lyrical Ballads in 1799, at Bath. Two 
years later, when he was sixteen, he read Ruth in a London 
newspaper, into which it had been copied ; and these first 
tastings of the new poetry were an intoxication. In 1803 he 
went up to Worcester College, Oxford, at the ordinary age of 
eighteen, and had already received a precious letter from Words- 
worth, a letter of kindly sympathy in reply to the enthusiastic 
and irrepressible outpourings of an admiring reader. During 
the extraordinary years before De Quincey's matriculation, the 
three years at Manchester Grammar School, ending with the 
picturesque flight in the sunlit silence of an early July morning 
so well known to all readers of the Opium-Eater ; the wander- 
ings in Wales ; the squalid months in rat-haunted London 
rooms, and among the perils of nocturnal Oxford Street ; 
mixing strangely with the earliest pleasures of opium, there 
was burning and growing in the boy's nature a pure intellectual 
passion, a ** nympholepsy," as he called it, in his pedantic way, 
of which Wordsworth — Wordsworth idealized among his 

195 



196 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

mountains — was the source and the object. In his first long 
walk from Manchester to Chester, the runaway was full of Ruth. 
With "an elaborate and pompous sunset" in front of him 
hanging over the mountains of North Wales, he thought of the 
American lake described to Ruth by her lover — 

" With all its fairy crowds 
Of islands that together lie 
As quietly as spots of sky 
Among the evening clouds." 

At that moment, as he somewhat theatrically puts it, he 
alone " in all Europe " was quoting from Wordsworth. That 
might be rather difficult to prove, but, at least, it seems certain 
that he alone, or all but alone — for was not " Christopher North," 
albeit somewhat doubtingly, with him } — among Wordsworthian 
readers and critics was intellectually in love with Wordsworth, 
smitten and subdued and modified by the mere charm of his 
verse. The poet was to him a hero to be looked at, a god to 
be sought and worshipped. Among the kindnesses in Words- 
worth's first letters was a frank invitation to visit him at Gras- 
mere, and the boy was at once eager and afraid to go. Before 
he had written to Wordsworth, when he was planning his escape 
from Manchester, he had thought of making for the Lakes, 
drawn thither by " a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, 
and spiritually strong." As a Manchester child, he had always 
been near them, and his imagination had been introduced to 
them by Mrs. Radcliffe. Then came the Wordsworthian engoue- 
ment. But that very engo7ieinent restrained as much as it 
impelled the impecunious fugitive from school. " The very 
depth of the impressions which had been made upon me, either 
as regarded the poetry or the scenery, was too solemn and 
(unaffectedly I may say it) too spiritual, to clothe itself in any 
hasty or chance movement as at all adequately expressing its 
strength, or reflecting its hallowed character. If you, reader, 
were a devout Mahometan, throwing gazes of mystical awe 
daily towards Mecca, or were a Christian devotee looking with 
the same rapt adoration to St. Peter's at Rome, or to El Kodah 
— the Holy City of Jerusalem — (so called even amongst the 
Arabs, who hate both Christian and Jew), how painfully would 
it jar upon your sensibilities, if some friend, sweeping past you 
upon a high road, with a train (according to the circumstances) 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 197 

of dromedaries or of wheel carriages, should suddenly pull up, 
and say, ' Come, old fellow, jump up alongside of me, I'm off for 
the Red Sea, and here's a spare dromedary ; ' or ' off for Rome, 
and here's a well-cushioned barouche ; ' seasonable and con- 
venient it might happen that the invitation were ; but still it 
would shock you that a journey which, with or without your 
consent, could not but assume the character eventually of a 
saintly pilgrimage, should arise and take its initial movement 
upon a casual summons, or upon a vulgar opening of momentary 
convenience." If he could ever dare to present himself to 
Wordsworth, it must be in circumstances very different from 
those in which he was running away from school, without money, 
and in disgrace. His first crop of wild oats once sown, however, 
once a member of the University of Oxford and Commoner of 
Worcester, De Quincey was respectable enough to bethink him- 
self of entering any presence. Nor did his interest in the 
Romantic Revival, and his passionate feeling for Wordsworth 
and the Lakes diminish while he was at Oxford. On the 
contrary, his desultory studies there were largely in English 
literature ; and, such was his critical discernment, that English 
literature meant for him not only Chaucer, Spenser, Shake- 
speare, Milton, but, beyond all cavil or question, Wordsworth 
and Coleridge also. And as for the Wordsworthian engoueme?it, 
there was no sign of its diminishing. "Extinguished such a 
passion could not be. . . . The very names of the ancient hills 
— Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara ; 
the names of the sequestered glens — such as Borrowdale, Martin- 
dale, Mardale, Wastdale, and Ennerdale; but, above all, the 
shy pastoral recesses . . . Grasmere, for instance, the lonely 
abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, 
with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings — here a scattering, 
and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens . . . these were 
so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with 
the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa." And under 
these spells, strengthening rather than weakening, that most 
unusual of undergraduates walked about the Oxford streets and 
the Worcester college gardens. 

In the course of vacation-rambles, De Quincey twice got as 
near Grasmere as Coniston ; but as yet he got no further. 
" Once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very 



198 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

gorge of Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere 
suddenly breaks upon the view . . . with its lovely valley 
stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake lying imme- 
diately below, with its solemn ark-like island . . . seemingly 
floating on its surface. ... In one quarter, a little wood . . . 
more directly in opposition to the spectator, a few green fields ; 
and beyond them, just two bowshots from the water, a little 
white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with a vast and 
seemingly never-ending series of ascents, rising above it to the 
height of more than three thousand feet. That little cottage 
was Wordsworth's. . . . Catching one hasty glimpse of this 
loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a guilty thing, for fear 
I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned, faint- 
heartedly, to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infectd" 

De Quincey crowned his academic queerness by absconding 
in the middle of the examination for his degree. That may 
have been in 1807, though there is no certainty about the matter. 
Certain it is, however, that in 1807 he first saw Wordsworth. 
Earlier in the same year he first saw Coleridge, and it was 
through Coleridge that he came eye to eye with Coleridge's 
great collaborator in Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge, indeed, shared 
the hero-worship he bestowed on Wordsworth, not only because 
of his poetry, but also because of his addiction to German philo- 
sophy, one of De Quincey's miscellaneous pursuits. Coleridge, 
De Quincey seems to have been readier to face than Words- 
worth ; and he was much disappointed that he was away in 
Malta from April, 1804, to August, 1806. He even had thoughts 
of going to Malta to gratify his longing, but he decided to wait. 
In 1807 Coleridge was in the west country. From Bristol to 
Bridgwater went De Quincey one summer day, bound for Tom 
Poole's at Nether Stowey. Poole he found, and was delighted 
with the " stout, plain-looking farmer," in his " rustic, old- 
fashioned house," with its splendid library ; but the incalculable 
S. T. C. was away on a visit. De Quincey stayed with Poole 
a day or two " until his [Coleridge's] motions should be ascer- 
tained " — always a difficult matter. For days they were un- 
ascertainable. Then De Quincey went over to Bridgwater to 
see whether he could find his prize ; and there, sure enough, 
under an archway in the main street, stood the man. '* In 
height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was, in 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 199 

reality, about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an 
order which drowns the height) ; his person was broad and full, 
and tended even to corpulence ; his complexion was fair, though 
not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated 
with black hair ; his eyes were large and soft in! their expres- 
sion ; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or 
dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognized my 
object." 

In the autumn, De Quincey met Coleridge at Bristol, heard 
from him that he was to be lecturing in London in the follow- 
ing winter, and offered to escort his wife and family to Keswick 
to their winter quarters at Greta Hall. The fateful moment 
had arrived. The escort was accepted ; and in October the 
party — Mrs. Coleridge, Hartley, aged nine, Derwent, two years 
younger, and Sara, two years younger still — set out with De 
Quincey, aged twenty-two, in a post-chaise, the horses' heads 
turned towards the North. 

North, with the minimum of deflection, the travellers went, 
by Gloucester, Bridgnorth, Liverpool, Lancaster, until, one 
afternoon about three, they found themselves changing horses 
for the last time at quiet Ambleside, at the gate of Paradise. 
There, in the still bright afternoon, along the road we know, 
across Pelter Bridge, along Rydal mere, and over "White-moss," 
with the view into Grasmere, before the final dip to the lake and 
Wordsworth's door. De Quincey and the two boys walk up the 
hill, of course ; and from the top they are minded to go down 
at a run, leaving the chaise to grind over the rough road at its 
own pace. 

" O moment, one and infinite ! " 

What is this cottage with the white walls, and the yew-trees 
in front, that at a turn of the road arrests suddenly the 
scamperers downhill ? Is it not the same that De Quincey 
fled from, "like a guilty thing surprised," the year before at 
Hammerscar ? Heavens ! it is ; for Hartley turns in at the 
gate. De Quincey tastes the fearful joys of hero-worship on 
the very edge of beatific vision. This time he will stand it out ; 
he will not run away. In his transport he forgets his manners ; 
he does not wait for the arrival of the chaise, that he may hand 
out Mrs. Coleridge ; he hurries in after Hartley, and has the 
reward of his long patience. 



200 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

All this is described by De Quincey with some artificiality 
of manner ; but his emotion, as every hero-worshipper knows, 
was perfectly natural, perfectly credible, and quite ordinary. 
What is not ordinary, what makes the moment remarkable, is 
the electricity that passed in that first handshake of Words- 
worth and De Quincey, the instant of physical contact be- 
tween a great poet, much misunderstood, greatly unpopular, 
serenely, coldly self-centred ; and a critic, hardly great, but 
infinitely ingenious, and with much in his power ; a critic, 
subtle, sensitive, sympathetic, doubtfully scrupulous ; accepting 
the Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth with all his 
heart, and yet ready, on the smallest provocation, to lacerate it 
here and there with his logical understanding, and in a fit of the 
spleen to expose his heroes with the resources of a master of 
style. 

However, electricity is, for the most part, a secret agency ; 
and the meeting was serene in itself and its immediate sequel. 
While the poet was receiving Mrs. Coleridge and Sara, De 
Quincey was making acquaintance, inside the cottage, first with 
Mrs. Wordsworth, and then with Dorothy. We already know 
his impression of the poet's wife. That of the " dear, dear 
sister," was equally vivid, and — from all the evidence we have — 
equally true. He saw the eyes, " not soft, nor fierce and bold, 
but wild and startling, and hurried in their motion." He saw 
the dark complexion, " gipsy " in its " determinate tan," as of 
one against whom the " misty mountain winds " are " free to 
blow." He felt the ardour and sensibility ; he was conscious of 
"some subtle fire of impassioned intellect . . . which, being 
alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by 
the irresistible instincts of her temperament, and then immedi- 
ately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age 
and her maidenly condition, gave to her whole demeanour, and 
to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self- 
conflict, that was almost distressing to witness. . . . At times, 
the self-counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused 
her even to stammer, and so determinately to stammer, that a 
stranger who should have seen her and quitted her in that state 
of feeling, would have certainly set her down for one plagued 
with that infirmity of speech, as distressingly as Charles Lamb 
himself." He thought she walked with a too "glancing 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 201 

quickness," and noticed that she stooped. Above everything, her 
wonderful intellectual sympathy struck him. You could tell 
her nothing-, quote nothing to her, which she did not receive so 
as to give it a new interest for you. " The pulses of light are 
not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and un- 
dulation, than were the answering and echoing movements of 
her sympathizing attention." This we can well believe. And 
we can also believe that, though Dorothy had had more chances 
of going into polite society than Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, 
though she had even lived " under the protection " of a Canon 
of Windsor, she was not so " lady-like " as Mrs. Wordsworth. 

But Wordsworth himself has by this time brought in Mrs. 
Coleridge, and they are standing, we may hope, by a good fire. 
What did De Quincey think of his hero in the flesh ? 

He thought, in the first place, that he was not well made. 
His legs, he thought, were faulty ; his shoulders were narrow 
and had a " droop," and his " total effect " was always worst " in 
a state of motion." But his face was more satisfactory. 

" Many such " [faces], writes De Quincey, '* and finer, I have 
seen amongst the portraits of Titian, and, in a later period, 
amongst those of Vandyke, from the great era of Charles I., as 
also from the Court of Elizabeth and of Charles H., but none 
which has more impressed me in my own time." It was a long 
North-of-England face ; the head was rounded behind as well as 
in front ; the forehead was remarkable for its breadth rather than 
its height. The eyes were small and neither " bright," " lustrous," 
nor " piercing " ; and yet at times, under the influence of 
physical fatigue, they would have a look " the most solemn and 
spiritual that it is possible for the human eye to wear." The 
nose, as all portraits show, was large and arched, indicating, 
De Quincey thinks, a strong animal basis of temperament. The 
mouth was not remarkable, but its " circumjacencies " were : 
there was a "swell and protrusion of the parts above and 
around " the lips, which reminded De Quincey of Milton's mouth, 
especially as it appears in the crayon drawing of Milton, engraved 
by Richardson, whose verisimilitude was eagerly attested by 
Milton's daughter. In other respects, De Quincey thought that 
Wordsworth's face was like Milton's ; in the droop of the eye- 
lids, and the lie of the hair on the brow. 

De Quincey's Wordsworthian fruition, the seeing of his hero 



202 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

face to face, produced, he tells us, a change "in the physical 
condition of his nervous system." This is a grand way of saying 
that, after he had seen and spoken to Wordsworth, he was no 
longer afraid of seeing and speaking to him. He regarded him 
henceforward as, like Milton's Raphael, an " affable angel, who 
conversed on the terms of man with man." The first evening 
passed pleasantly ; the old-fashioned lamp-lit tea-table of a 
November evening was delightful ; and then Wordsworth read 
from Fairfax's Tasso ; and then " about eleven," De Quincey 
found himself in (presumably) the bedroom which the Words- 
worths had built. It was a narrow squeeze at Dove Cottage 
when there were guests ; and in the morning De Quincey 
discovered (he seems to have been too sleepy to discover it at 
night, or what kind of light did he go to bed by ?) that a 
" cottage bed " in the room was occupied by Wordsworth's three 
years' old boy John, who woke him by repeating the creed as 
part of his matins. Dorothy made breakfast on that rainy 
morning ; and then, in spite of the rain, the poet and his sister 
took De Quincey round the six-mile circuit of Rydal and 
Grasmere lakes. Mrs. Coleridge and her children pursued their 
journey to Keswick ; and the next day, Mr. and Mrs. Words- 
worth and Dorothy started with De Quincey on an expedition 
to see Southey, and the joint-establishment of Southeys and 
Coleridges at Greta Hall. They went by way of Ullswater, 
driving to Ambleside in a one-horse cart driven by " a bonnie 
young woman," Dorothy scattering genial salutations as they 
rumbled along. On they went, walking, of course, up the steep 
ascent of Kirkstone Pass ; then, in the cart again, down upon 
Brothers' Water and Patterdale, at whose inn they stopped in 
the moonlight. There a change of horses ; and on " through those 
most romantic woods and rocks of Stybarrow — through those 
silent glens of Glencoin and Glenridding — through . . . Gobarrow 
Park — we saw, alternately, for four miles, the most grotesque and . 
the most awful spectacles — m 

' Abbey windows ! 

With Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' 

all fantastic, all as unreal and shadowy as the moonlight which 
created them ; whilst, at every angle of the road, broad gleams 
came upwards of Ullswater, stretching for nine miles north- 
ward, but, fortunately for its effect, broken into three watery 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 203 

chambers of almost equal length, and never all visible at once." 
At " Ewesmere" (probably Easemerehill close to Pooley Bridge) 
they spent the night, and there they left the ladies. Wordsworth 
and his guests walked on by Emont Bridge to Penrith ; and on 
that day tete-d-tete companionship between the two probably 
began ; for did not Wordsworth read part of his White Doe of 
Rylstone, hardly yet seriously begun, to the disciple ? — an incident 
"most memorable" to the critic. De Quincey left Wordsworth 
behind at Penrith, and walked over the hills alone by Threlkeld 
to Keswick and Greta Hall, where Southey and Mrs. Coleridge 
received him. Thither came Wordsworth the following day ; 
and De Quincey watched the two great men together, with eyes 
on the look-out, and ears listening for mischief. He thought they 
were not very friendly, or, at least, not more than friendly. In one 
respect, however, they seemed to him too friendly, namely, in 
their sentiments on public affairs. De Quincey was an orthodox 
Pittite ; and he heard, with dismay, echoes of unmistakable 
" Jacobinism," as it seemed to him, in the sympathetic talk of 
Wordsworth and Southey. There was even profane jibing at 
the English royal family, and about the hopelessness of any good 
for England until they were expatriated, say to Botany Bay ! 
What was a proper young Oxford Tory to think of the con- 
venience of such jesting t 

Next day, the two pedestrians returned to Dove Cottage, and 
the first chapter of De Quincey's personal acquaintance with 
Wordsworth was closed. He went south, first to Bristol, and 
then to London, seeing much of Coleridge, and, once, giving 
the poor laudanum - dazed, lecturing, ambulatory man very 
substantial pecuniary help. 

In June, 1808, the Wordsworths made their flitting from the 
too strait bounds of Dove Cottage to Allan Bank. As the 
winter drew on, and Wordsworth settled down to the Convention 
of Cintra, the discomforts of a hastily-chosen new house pressed 
on the inhabitants. The chimneys smoked ; the cellars were wet. 
One day the whole household had to go to bed because no fire 
would burn without intolerable smoke. If things could not be 
remedied, the Wordsworths would have to leave Grasmere, for 
there was no other house to be had. Fortunately, the final 
efforts of the workmen must have been rewarded with some 
success, for Allan Bank remained the Wordsworth's home until 



204 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

1811. The first winter there was not dull, though it was uncom- 
fortable. The discomfort, indeed, was heightened by the fact 
that they had guests during great part of the time. Coleridge 
was there, trying to launch TJie Friend^ and preparing the first 
number. Coleridge was still very dear to the Wordsworths, 
dear and worrying and, for the most part, grievous. He was 
trying to do without opium, and his London lectures had not 
been a failure. Still, he was in wretched health, physical and 
moral, as, indeed, he nearly always was. He was frankly 
separated from his wife that winter ; that is, he lived at Allan 
Bank, and she at Greta Hall, to their mutual satisfaction, and, 
as Dorothy Wordsworth hoped, their mutual benefit. "They 
are upon friendly terms," she wrote, " and occasionally see each 
other. In fact, Mrs. Coleridge was more than a week at Grasmere 
under the same roof with him." Things might have been worse, 
then ; but it could not be said that they were ideal. 

De Quincey, too, was a guest at Allan Bank that winter ; 
but neither from him nor from the Wordsworths have any 
particulars of his visit come to us. He must, however, have 
known all about the first number of The Friend ; and he 
certainly knew all about the Conve>ition of Cintra pamphlet. 
In the spring of 1809 he went south again, to Bristol and 
London, to " eat dinners " and otherwise make some kind of over- 
tures towards active life ; and in London he saw Wordsworth's 
pamphlet through the press, enriching it with an appendix, 
and worrying the printers with his punctuation. Wordsworth 
thought De Quincey's additions " most masterly," and was 
very grateful to his Oxford disciple, in spite of his finicking 
ways with colons and semi-colons. All the foundations of a 
close friendship were being laid. While De Quincey was at 
Allan Bank, he was keeping his eye on Dove Cottage ; and, 
before he left, it was settled that he was to be its next tenant, — 
Dorothy undertaking the oversight of furnishing and the rest of 
it, against his return in November. She enjoyed the work ; 
and it is evident that the coming of the new occupant was 
much looked forward to in the Vale. Backwards and forwards 
Dorothy trudged between Allan Bank and the cottage in that 
spring and summer of 1809 (the great year, for England, of 
Darwin's birth and Tennyson's and Gladstone's ; the year, also, 
in which Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers saw the 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 205 

light) ; seeing to the laying of carpets, the hanging of curtains ; 
above all, the setting-up of bookshelves for one of the most 
bookish of men ; in that respect, how unlike her William ! The 
Wordsworths were too near at Allan Bank to feel it any pain to 
go back to Dove Cottage ; and Dorothy loved her visits in De 
Quincey's interest ; hearing the cuckoo as of old, and fancying 
that the little birds in the orchard recognized her, and rejoiced 
in the branches of the apple-trees at her presence. 

De Quincey's coming, she felt, would carry on the Words- 
worthian tradition at the cottage. " Pleasant indeed it is to 
think of that little orchard, which for over seven years at least 
[such was the length of De Quincey's lease] will be a secure 
covert for the birds, and undisturbed by the woodman's axe." 
So Dorothy wrote. And she went on telling her " dear friend " 
of the " impious strife " waged that year by the said woodman's 
axe among the old trees on Nab Scar, and of "the wicked 
passions," uttering themselves in lawsuits and rumours of law- 
suits, that were let loose in the very sanctuary of Nature. 

De Quincey arrived, bag and baggage, in October, to stay 
with the Wordsworths and bear with them the still smoky 
chimneys of Allan Bank, while his servant prepared the 
cottage. More than a month he enjoyed this ever-ready 
hospitality — Dorothy writing that he seemed like one of the 
family. At last the cottage was ready, and he entered on his 
long residence there, his occupancy, with many long intervals, 
for twenty-seven years. 

And De Quincey loved his cottage, well enough, at least, to 
live there a great deal, and to write about it in his most 
engaging style. For his sake, the reader will bear to hear a 
little more about it, so that when he goes to look at it he may 
remember that it has a complete double set of associations. 

" Cottage immortal in my remembrance ! " he apostrophized 
it once. " This was the scene of struggles the most tempestuous 
and bitter within my own mind : this the scene of my despon- 
dency and unhappiness : this the scene of my happiness — a 
happiness which justified the faith of man's earthly lot as upon 
the whole a dowry from heaven ! It was, in its exterior, not so 
much a picturesque cottage ... as it was lovely : one gable-end 
was, indeed, most gorgeously apparelled in ivy, and so far pictu- 
resque ; but . . . the front . . . was embowered — nay, it may be 



206 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

said, smothered — in roses of different species, amongst which the 
moss and the damask prevailed. These, together with as much 
jasmine and honeysuckle as could find room to flourish, . . . 
performed the acceptable service of breaking the unpleasant glare 
that would else have wounded the eye. ... It was very irregular 
in its outline to the rear, by the aid of one little projecting 
room, and also of a stable and little barn in immediate contact 
with the dwelling-house." 

Here, then, a mile from one of the poets of his dearest 
adoption, with his thirty chestfuls or so of books, and, alas ! with 
a decanter full of laudanum on the table beside him, at all 
events, on Saturday nights, this singular young man of twenty- 
five, the " most well-informed man of his age " that Southey 
had ever met (and Southey's standard of information was 
high), settled down to read German philosophy, pedestrianize, 
and intoxicate himself with the alluring Eastern drug. He 
made a strange and dubious successor to the harmless, 
abstemious Wordsworths — abstemious almost as much from 
reading, in De Quincey's avid sense of the word, as from 
illegitimate stimulants and sedatives. Yet we must not reject 
the kind of romance with which the opium-eater invested Dove 
Cottage in his turn. When we have had enough of the sweet 
garden-life and Nature-worship of William and Dorothy, let us, 
years afterwards, enter Dove Cottage on some bleak winter 
night, and look on at another kind of pleasure. De Quincey 
has by this time taken a wife, a healthy, homely, Westmorland 
lass, Margaret Simpson by name, daughter of Farmer Simpson 
(a " statesman," as freeholder-farmers are called in those parts), 
who lived at Nab Cottage. He loves winter and darkness and 
artificial light, so we must not look for him in the orchard or the 
summer-house or by the well, or prone on daisy- or celandine- 
besprinkled grass. Winter, " in its sternest shape," was an | 
essential of De Quincey's happiness, not for the sake of sunlight 
on snow-wreath, sparkle of icicle, or the pink flush of mild 
sunsets on the high clouds, but for the sake of "the divine! 
pleasures" of a winter fireside. He enumerates them:! 
** Candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea- 1 
maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on| 
the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. | 
. . . Start at the first week of November ; thence to the end ofj 

i 




THOMAS DE QUINCKY 

FROM THE I'AINTING BY SIR J. WATSON GORDON IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 207 

January, Christmas Eve being the meridian line, you may com- 
pute the period when happiness is in season, which, in my 
judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray." And the tea- 
tray is not mainly for Mrs. De Quincey's benefit, nor is it a 
piece of ceremonialism. There is an " eternal teapot " in the 
vision. " I [De Quincey] usually drink tea from eight o'clock 
at night to four in the morning." As we look in, then, we see 
these things ; and we see that the room is " populous " with 
about five thousand books, steadily collected since De Quincey 
went to Oxford. We see a good fire and simple furniture, and 
a motherly and not intellectual wife making tea. Lastly, we see 
a decanter holding a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum on the 
table ; beside it a book of German metaphysics ; and, near the 
candles and the laudanum and the German metaphysics, we see 
the large head and pale, short-sighted face of De Quincey 
himself 

No other inhabitation did Dove Cottage know in the tens 
and twenties of the nineteenth century. Yet De Quincey was by 
no means always there ; he went to London and ate dinners at 
the Middle Temple ; he went to the west country ; he went to 
Edinburgh and saw " Christopher North " about Blackwood. As 
a rule, he soon drifted back to Grasmere. In 182 1 he was some 
months in London, and in that year the Confessions of an 
English Opiimi-Eater began to come out in the London 
Magazine, Yet, if it was (as it is credibly reported) in London, 
and ** in a little room at the back of Mr. H. G. Bohn's premises, 
No. 4, York Street, Covent Garden," that De Quincey described 
the pleasures and pains of opium, it was at Dove Cottage that 
he felt them. The " pains of opium," those delirious horrors in 
that jasmine-clothed, rose-scented place of innocence and peace ; 
what a paradox ! 

The year 18 13 was critical in the lives of both De Quincey 
and Wordsworth. For Wordsworth it was the year in which he 
finally left Grasmere and settled at Rydal Mount. For De 
Quincey it was a year of multiform calamity. Something — 
probably something pecuniary — went seriously wrong in his 
affairs ; illness, *' a most appalling irritation of the stomach," 
seized him ; he became " a regular and confirmed (no longer an 
intermitting) opium-eater." We may think of the year, perhaps, 
as the moment of transition from the pleasures to the pains. It 



208 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

was unfortunate, no doubt, from this point of view, that the 
Wordsworths left the Vale, and went even to so short a distance 
as Rydal. For their going denuded Grasmere of the society 
which might have kept De Quincey on a higher moral plane. 
Coleridge had disappeared from those parts in 1810, to go 
to London, then to Bristol, and finally, to enter on his long 
domestication at Highgate ; and the Lakes saw him no more. 
Southey was a long way off ; and Southey did not care much 
for De Quincey. During their last years at Grasmere, De 
Quincey's relations to the Wordsworths were rather uncertain. 
With Wordsworth himself the friendship did not grow. There 
was no positive breach, but there was undeniable estrangement, 
which was emphasized by the departure of the poet from the 
Vale. Wordsworth was reserved ; and, though he was in no 
discreditable sense self-involved, he lived too much in the 
practice of his art, too much in the routine of domesticity, and 
too much in the rites of Nature-worship, to set much store by 
companionship, however intellectually congenial. And was 
perfect intellectual congeniality possible between those two 
men ? De Quincey had helped Wordsworth with his pamphlet ; 
he understood his poetry, at least better than any other of the 
small band of Wordsworth-readers in those days ; and, before 
he saw him, his heart had bounded like a lover's at the thought 
of him. But was that enough for a perfect friendship with such 
a man ? Was not De Quincey too bookish, too merely ingenious 
and subtle, to claim perfect fellowship with one so absolutely 
original, so naked-souled as Wordsworth .? And then their habits 
were so irreconcilable! There is no reason to suppose that 
De Quincey would hide, or would try or wish to hide, the 
laudanum-decanter from Wordsworth's austere eye ; and what 
can Wordsworth have thought of that ? And the tea-drinking 
till four in the morning ! Those were not Wordsworth's ways. 
And the German metaphysics ! We know what Wordsworth 
thought of them and of German literature in general when he 
was in Germany ; and he was not a man to change his estimates 
under anybody's influence. Both men were great walkers, but 
even here they differed. For while Wordsworth would stroll out 
before an orthodox bedtime to see the moon and the stars, De 
Quincey was an out-and-out nocturnal animal ; and, as he 
prowled along, he thought less of moon and stars than of signs 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 209 

of humanity ; the twinklings in cottage windows ; the telling of 
the hours to heedless ears in graves. And, to crown all, there 
was De Quincey's incurable, appalling shyness ; his irrepressible 
impulse always to run away from everybody ! 

But if he drew off from Wordsworth himself, if the glamour 
of years inevitably waned, De Quincey was still closely knit 
with Dorothy. The Wordsworth children, too, twined themselves 
round his still bachelor heart, and the shy, pale-faced little man, 
with his comings and goings, was an object of great interest to the 
youngsters. A letter from him, when an absentee in London, 
would bring a flush of pleasure to Johnny's face ; and all the 
children looked eagerly for the promised gifts — the black hat, 
the toy carriage, or whatever they might be — on his return. 
Poor little Katy was his special friend. As an infant she 
noticed De Quincey more than anybody, except her mother. 
When she died, in 1812, he mourned her with a note of real 
poignancy. He was in London at the time of her death ; 
Dorothy wrote to tell him of it, and of " the perfect image of 
peace " on the bed. " I was truly glad to find," he wrote, in the 
course of his reply, "from your account of her funeral, that 
those who attended were, in general, such as would more or less 
unaffectedly partake in your sorrow. It has been an awful 
employment to me, the recollecting where I was and how 
occupied when this solemn scene was going on. At that time 
I must have been in the streets of London ; tired, I remember, 
for I had just recovered from sickness, but cheerful, and filled 
with pleasant thoughts. ... As well as I recollect, I must have 
been closing my eyes in sleep just about the time that my 
blessed Kate was closing hers for ever ! Oh that I might have 
died for her or with her ! ... If I had seen her in pain I could 
have done anything for her ; and reason it was that I should, 
for she was a blessing to me^ and gave me many and many an 
hour of happy thoughts that I can never have again." His 
heart, he assures Dorothy, grows heavier every day. As he was 
packing his things to go back to Westmorland, he remembered 
how, on the Sunday before he left Grasmere, Katy got up on 
a chair, and putting her hand on his mouth, whispered earnestly, 
" Kinsey ! Kinsey ! what a bring Katy from London ? " Never, 
he thought, should he hear so sweet a voice again. The poor 
child, as we know, was to her father an incarnation of childhood, 
p 



210 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

and some of his sweetest poetry of childhood was dedicated to 
her. It was, in some respects, the same with De Quincey. He 
made prose-poetry about her; he fanned and stimulated his 
passionate feeling about her. *' I had always viewed her," he 
wrote, "as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of 
infancy ; and this abstraction seated in her person, together 
with the visionary sort of connection which even in her parting 
hours she assumed with the summer sun, by turning her 
immersion into the cloud of death with the rising and the 
setting of that fountain of life — these combined impressions 
recoiled so violently into a contrast or polar antithesis to the 
image of death, that each exalted and heightened the other." 
And so, when he came back to Grasmere, little Katy's spirit 
was with him all the summer, bringing her innocent presence 
into his opium-led reveries and dreams. He tasted something 
of the luxury of woe. He tells us that he often passed the 
night on her grave " in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning 
after neighbourhood to " the darling of his heart. In broad 
daylight he would resort to certain upland fields where he knew 
he should see the sweet phantom ; born, as it seemed, out of 
ferns and flowers ; always coming towards him with a basket 
on her head, wearing ** the little blue bedgown and black skirt 
of Westmorland." 

When little Tom followed his sister in December, De 
Quincey was again absent, and the tidings met him at Liverpool 
on his way home. Wordsworth himself was his informant ; 
and his letter breathes anything but estrangement. " Pray 
come to us," he wrote, " as soon as you can. . . . Most tenderly 
and lovingly, with heavy sorrow for you, my dear friend (it 
was the time of De Ouincey's mysterious misfortune). I remain 
yours, W. Wordsworth." 

Yet, for all this, the milk of De Quincey's feeling for 
Wordsworth was losing its sweetness, and there was never any 
return of the old fascination. The Wordsworths went to Rydal, 
and a new chapter of their life began. The pains of opium 
held De Quincey helpless for years. When recovery set in, his 
movements were more and more regulated by the exigencies 
of the journalistic career into which he had drifted, a career 
which, in those days as in these, a man could hardly follow 
satisfactorily among far-away mountains, even in a Paradise. 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 211 

To London or Edinburgh — in those days as much an intellectual 
centre as London — or to the immediate neighbourhood of either, 
the journalist was inevitably drawn, De Quincey, after some 
years in I^ondon, fixed himself for the rest of his life in and 
near Edinburgh. For a time he was kept among the Lakes by 
his first definite journalistic job, the editorship of the Westmor- 
land Gazette, which lasted for about a year, in 1819 and 1820. 
But he was made for higher things; and in September, 1821, 
the best of his mind began to appear to the world in the pages 
of the London Magazine, in the shape of the first instalment of 
the Confessions of an English Opiiim-Eater. Henceforward, 
though Dove Cottage remained the home of his wife and 
children until 1830, and he was occasionally there, he could 
hardly consider himself the neighbour of Wordsworth. 

De Quincey thought Wordsworth very "proud." As he 
put it, instead of calling him as proud as Lucifer, one ought 
to say that Lucifer may possibly be nearly as proud as Words- 
worth. Yet, in 18 14, Wordsworth was consulting De Quincey 
about Laodamia, and welcoming his criticisms deferentially. 
And two years later, Wordsworth was complaining that De 
Quincey had "taken a fit of solitude." One phase of the 
Words worthian "pride " galled De Quincey after his marriage 
in 1 8 16. Good Margaret Simpson, the "statesman's " daughter of 
Rydal Nab, was not the kind of Mrs. De Quincey on whom Mr. 
and Mrs. Wordsworth felt they could call ; or, if they called, they 
let the acquaintance drop at that point. There seems no doubt 
that the good woman suffered social neglect at their hands ; and 
De Quincey was not philosophical enough not to wince. After 
his wife's death he wrote pathetically, with a reference which, 
though hidden, is unmistakable. " The hour is passed irre- 
vocably and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so 
natural, and costing so little (in both senses so priceless) could 
have been availing. The ear is deaf that should have been 
solaced by the sound of welcome. Call, but you will not be 
heard ; shout aloud, but your * Ave ! ' and * All hail ! ' will now 
tell only as an echo of departed days, proclaiming the hollow- 
ness of human hope." 

In this painful situation, Dorothy seems to have tried to play 
the part of helper and healer. She went to Dove Cottage, with 
her bright eyes and enchanting sympathy, during De Quincey's 



212 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

long absences ; and when at last it was evident that Edinburgh 
was to be his home, it was Dorothy who suggested that he ' 
should move his family thither from Grasmere. She saw, she 
wrote to him, the sadness in his wife's manner ; and she made 
bold to advise that the separation should be brought to an end ; 
as in due time it was. To Edinburgh the family went ; and 
there the wife and mother died and was buried. 

But De Quincey was not wholly egoistic when he spoke of- 
Wordsworth's pride. By " pride " he also and chiefly meant hig| 
serene self-consciousness, his lofty self-approval. And for that 
he had a good as well as a bad word. One of his best pieces of 
literary criticism occurs incidentally in an article on one of 
Landor's Imaginary Co7iversations, in which Landor and 
Southey discuss Milton. By one of the speakers, Wordsworth 
is reported to have spoken slightingly of Keats, and is blamed 
accordingly. De Quincey does not dwell long, though he dwells 
to much purpose, on Keats ; but he says a good deal about 
Wordsworth, and especially about the nobler phase of his pride. 
The interlocutors put down Wordsworth's depreciation of Keats 
to envy. Any such idea De Quincey scouts utterly. '* Words- 
worth is a very proud man, as he has good reason to be. . . . 
But if proud, Wordsworth is not ostentatious, is not anxious for 
display, and least of all is he capable of descending to envy. 
Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does any- 
body suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimedes 
if he now walked upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton ? 
Nature does not repeat herself. Be assured she will never 
make a second Wordsworth." Wordsworth, he means, was not 
only great, absolutely great, but unique. " If you show to 
Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man will 
not be much like Wordsworth — the great man will not be 
Wordsworth's doppelgdnger. If not impar (as you say) he will be 
dispar ; and why, then, should Wordsworth be jealous of him ? 
. . . But suddenly it strikes me that we are all proud, every 
man of us ; and I dare say with some reason for it." De 
Quincey was in a rather riotously playful mood when he wrote 
this essay ; and he soon passes into his characteristic persiflage. 
But, so far as Wordsworth was concerned, he, in the words 
which have been quoted, wrote, surely, with genuine magnani- 
mity, genuine insight. 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 213 

After years of habitual separation from the Lake Poets, De 
Quincey began to use them as copy. In the thirties, there 
appeared those Recollections of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and 
Southey, from which, here and there, quotations have already 
been made. With Wordsworth De Quincey dealt much more 
handsomely than with Coleridge, with whom he wrangled as a 
rival opium-eater, and then abused for plagiarism, and one 
knows not what besides. Yet his touch on Wordsworth is not 
that of the hero-worshipper ; it is hardly that of the friend. He 
tells d. propos of nothing in particular that Wordsworth once, 
and only once, got drunk at Cambridge. By hints here and 
suggestions there, in a characterization meant to be exceedingly 
favourable, he manages to give the impression of a personality 
fundamentally unattractive. We are told, probably quite truly, 
that Wordsworth was incapable of the self-surrender without 
which a man cannot be a proper lover. We are told of occasional 
peevishness and ill-humour ; we are given to understand a lack 
of amiability ; we are assured of a total absence of gallantry. 
And Wordsworth's indifference to books is, in De Quincey's 
version of it, somehow made to show some shabbiness of mind as 
well as slenderness of purse. Much of the disillusionment 
suffered by Wordsworth in De Quincey's regard turned on the 
intellectual narrowness shown in his very partial and very one- 
sided interest in literature. That narrowness made the dis- 
illusion a loss of critical respect, as well as a diminution of 
personal affection. " It is impossible," wrote De Quincey, in 
his over-emphatic way, " to imagine the perplexity of mind 
which possessed me when I heard Wordsworth ridicule many 
books which I had been accustomed to admire profoundly." 
His one-sidedness in literary taste amounted to a deformity. 
He would praise mere nobodies and dispraise classics. De 
Quincey seriously doubted if he had ever read a page of Scott's 
novels. This was strange and shocking indeed, nor, of course, 
was it true. Yet, as regards Wordsworth's taste in fiction, it 
would seem that it was in one respect sounder than his quondam 
disciple's. For he read and admired Fielding, Smollett, and 
Le Sage, at whom De Quincey only turned up his nose. On 
the whole, De Quincey came to view Wordsworth as " a mixed 
creature, made up of special infirmity and special strength," 
and as " no longer capable of an equal friendship." 



214 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

In the year 1845, five years before the poet's death, De 
Quincey composed a final critical estimate of Wordsworth. 
He announced it with something of a flourish of trumpets. It 
was to be an estimate of the poet's total work, a thing he had 
not attempted in the case of any writer before. Yet the 
achievement does not bear out the preface. The essay is little 
more than an outline, a series of reflections and notes, favourable 
and unfavourable, on Wordsworth's poetry, out of which a 
complete critical estimate might be made. But it has, at least, 
the importance of being De Quincey's last word on the subject, 
a word spoken at a long remove, in time and space, from 
irritating thoughts and irritated feelings. 

" In calm of mind, all passion spent." 

It is characteristic of the critic and of the developed relation- 
ship between the two men that he begins with dispraise. In the 
course of accounting for Wordsworth's early unpopularity, he 
falls upon his theory of poetic diction, with which, however, he 
fails to deal either exhaustively or very impressively. His 
conclusion, indeed, is that "the whole question moved by 
Wordsworth is still a res Integra (a case untouched). And for 
this reason, that no sufficient specimen has ever been given of 
the particular phraseology which each party contemplates as 
good or as bad ; no man in this dispute steadily understands even 
himself." So De Quincey takes his leave of poetic diction. 

Then come his suggestions for praise. The first is recondite 
and subtle. Hazlitt remarked that Wordsworth dealt little in 
his poetry with " marrying and giving in marriage." ** Well," 
replies De Quincey, "one man cannot deal with everything. 
But there is another reason why Wordsworth could not meddle 
with festal raptures like the glory of a wedding-day. These 
raptures are not only too brief, but (which is worse) they tend 
downwards ; even for as long as they last, they do not move 
upon an ascending scale. And even that is not their worst 
fault : they do not diffuse or communicate themselves. . . . 
Mere joy, that does not linger and reproduce itself in reverbera- 
tions and endless mirrors, is not fitted for poetry." This is 
hardly convincing. Spenser's Epithalamium * is surely poetry, 

* De Quincey refers to Spenser's Epithalamia [sic), but only as poems which 
"nobody reads." 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 215 

if poetry ever was ; and it is made out of " mere joy " with no 
reverberations or reflections, no altruistic arvihe pensie of any 
sort. Could Wordsworth not have written it only because he 
was more unselfish than Spenser, and therefore had truer insight 
into poetic fitness ? 

But De Quincey gives yet another and a better reason for 
Wordsworth's avoidance of unrelieved joy. Wordsworth, he 
thinks, was constitutionally obliged always to contemplate joy 
in relation to its opposites, to pain and grief. In illustration, he 
points to Matthew, and the cheerfulness born out of his sorrows ; 
to We are Seven, and its blending of life so intense as to destroy 
death with the very idea of the death that is destroyed. " The 
little mountaineer, who furnishes the text for this lovely strain, 
she whose fulness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a 
grave, is yet (for the effect upon the reader) brought into con- 
nection with the reflex shadows of the grave. . . . That same 
infant, which subjectively could not tolerate death, being by the 
reader contemplated objectively, flashes upon us the tenderest 
images of death." Here we feel that De Quincey is as sound 
as he is subtle. It was of the very essence of Wordsworth, as it 
must be of all the greatest men, to find no beauty in falsification ; 
to be content with no sugaring of life for poetic purposes ; no 
filtering of daylight through rose-coloured curtains. His joys 
were " three parts pain ; " " the Comforter " was surest to find 
him at his heaviest moments ; it was " sweet " to him when 
pleasant thoughts brought sad thoughts to his mind. He had 
reached the faith which looks through death ; and the source of 
his joy was there. 

De Quincey proceeds to give a brief account of some of the 
books of The Excursion. With the story of Margaret in Book 
I., and, indeed, with the whole poem, he deals in the spirit of 
Jeffrey rather than in that of Coleridge. " Not in The Excur- 
sion" he concludes, " must we look for that reversionary in- 
fluence which awaits Wordsworth with posterity." We must 
look for it in his short poems ; where we shall find it in their 
"truth" ; their power of strengthening impressions already faintly 
made, or of suddenly unveiling "a connection between objects 
hitherto regarded as irrelate and independent." It is truth of 
Nature, truth of scenery, primarily, which it was Wordsworth's 
prerogative thus to reveal. From Shakespeare onwards such 



216 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

revelation had been suspended. " At length, as the eighteenth 
century was winding up its accounts, forth stepped William 
Wordsworth, of whom, as a reader of all pages of Nature it may 
be said that, if we except Dampier, the admirable buccaneer, 
the gentle Jlibustier, and some few professional naturalists, he 
first and he last looked at natural objects with the eye that 
neither will be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconcep- 
tion from within." The careful student of Wordsworth will 
hardly be satisfied with this, in spite of its plausibility. For it 
conveys a wrong idea of Wordsworth's nature-poetry, of his 
attitude towards Nature and his method of dealing with her. 
It gives the impression of Wordsworth as a careful realist ; a 
reproducer of Nature's minuticB, without limitation and without 
arrihe pensie. But it is not so ; Wordsworth was far from being 
any such "naturalist" in verse. In spite of poems about pet 
lambs, greenfinches, cuckoos, and daffodils ; in spite of poems 
about clouds and waterfalls, he was no poet of such objects in 
themselves, and those who go to him fancying that he was, 
will always be disappointed. He was a poet of the Universe 
and of Man ; a poet of large vague objects and effects, of 
abstractions in their ultimate truth expressible only by sug- 
gestion. And the scenery of the Lake district, its flora and 
fauna, its clouds and waters, was used by Wordsworth, not for 
its own sake, but for the sake of the Universal Life and Beauty 
which informed them. Many readers of Wordsworth fail to 
grasp this ; it is strange that De Quincey should be among 
them ! 

His insight is true when he speaks of Wordsworth as a 
revealer of spiritual truths in these human relations, and it 
helps him to a worthy leave-taking of the poet who, from first 
to last, had bulked so largely in his life. His early unpopularity 
in this respect came from no weakness or shortcoming ; it was 
the inevitable result of the poet's originality and depth, 
"Whatever is too original will be hated at the first. It must 
slowly mould a public for itself. . . . Meditative poetry is, 
perhaps, that province of literature which will ultimately main- 
tain most power amongst the generations which are coming ; 
but in this department, at least, there is little competition to be 
apprehended by Wordsworth from anything that has appeared 
since the death of Shakespeare." 



CHAPTER X 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 

OUR last glimpse of Charles Lamb was at the end of his 
holiday-week in 1797, in the return coach from Bridg- 
water to Bristol, on his way back to London ; — the India House, 
and the terrible problems of his tragedy-smitten home-life. A 
series of poems — too sacredly personal to be criticized as mere 
poetry — remains to show something of what the collapse of 
Lamb's first home meant to him. The week at Nether Stowey 
with Coleridge and the Wordsworths was but a tiny green islet 
in a " deep wide sea " of black weltering waves. Charles Lamb 
was only twenty-two, and he was to be before all things a 
humorist ; but the grief which speaks in these verses is neither 
sentimental nor theatrical. His mother dead, we remember 
how ; his sister in her shroud of alienation ; his father stricken 
with palsy, and in a few months to follow his wife out of the 
world, what could compensate for all this } Even his good old 
aunt, who had been so kind to him in his school-days, so 
interested in his yellow coat, blue gown, and red belt — even 
she must needs leave him in this dark time ! 

" Farewell, good aunt ! 
Go thou and occupy the same grave-bed 
Where the dead mother lies." 

In after-life, religion, in any of its more definite forms, did 
not play a great part in Charles Lamb's nature ; literature, 
friendship, the patience of daily duty, and the sanctities of 
brotherly compassion and tenderness, seemed to suffice for that 
strange privileged being. But in those days of early sorrow, 
he was brought well within the circle of Christian thought and 

217 



218 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

consolation. Even when he hung over his mother's dead body, 

he ielt— 

" The blest subsidings of the storm 
Within, the sweet resignedness of hope 
Drawn heavenward, and strength of fiUal love. 
In which I bow'd me to my Father's will." 

That his poor father was soon taken was not the worst of 
his sorrows. That place was held by Mary's aberration and 
enforced absence from his hearth. Yet even under this load he 
would not sink, would hardly bend. 

" Yet I will not think, 
Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet, and live 
In quietness, and die so, fearing God." 

Thus, in default of hope, resignation closes on as deep a 
note, surely, as it has ever sounded — 

" If not, and these false suggestions be 
A fit of the weak nature, loth to part 
With what it loved so long, and held so dear ; 
If thou art to be taken, and I left 
(More sinning, yet unpunished, save in thee), 
It is the will of God, and we are day 
In the potter's hands ; and, at the worst, are made 
From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace, 
Till, His most righteous purpose wrought in us, 
Our purified spirits find their perfect rest." 

After such intimate breathings, the well-known Old Fatniliar 
Faces, with its quaint rhymeless austerity of reminiscence and 
regret, seems ordinary ; yet it belongs to the same date, and is 
directly linked with the central tragedy. 

" I had a mother, but she died and left me. 
Died prematurely in a day of horrors — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 



" For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some ai'e takejifrom me ; all are departed ; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

From Stowey, Lamb took back to London Wordsworth's 
friendship as a permanent possession ; and henceforward he 
must be regarded as a regular member of the "circle." He 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 219 

was, indeed, a typical member of it : the friendship between 
the two men was constant ; on Wordsworth's side, tenderly 
appreciative to the last hour of Lamb's life and beyond it ; on 
Lamb's side, respectfully, but always critically, appreciative. 
Lamb was ten years older than De Quincey, and only five 
years younger than Wordsworth himself. He never took De 
Quincey's attitude of discipleship ; he never felt the younger 
man's engoueinent for Wordsworth. Nor was he quite (if the 
expression may be allowed) of Wordsworth's kidney. He was 
one of the greatest of critics — much too great, too sympathetic, 
and too fully emancipated from the conventionalisms of the 
eighteenth-century tradition to attack Wordsworth as an 
innovator. But the greatest and most open-minded critic may 
have his favourites and favouritisms ; his genius may have its 
natural starting-point, its chosen exercise-ground. Lamb's 
favouritism was for dramatic poetry ; his palaestra was among 
the Elizabethans. His specific task was to revive the Eliza- 
bethans ; to restore them to critical favour ; to explain their 
inward significance. And after the Elizabethans proper, he 
loved poets like Cowley and Wither. " Meditative " poetry (to 
use De Quincey's favourite epithet), like Wordsworth's, had no 
special relish for him. 

In many respects. Lamb's affinities were with Coleridge, the 
friend through whom he came to know Wordsworth, rather 
than with Wordsworth himself. Both critics had a much wider 
outlook over literature than Wordsworth ; both were full of 
Elizabethan and dramatic sympathies. Nor were their direct 
attitudes to Wordsworth so very different. True, Coleridge 
was Wordsworth's colleague ; together they planned a new 
poetry ; together they issued Lyrical Ballads. But there colla- 
boration ceased. Wordsworth's theories of poetry, especially 
his theories of poetic diction and imagination, he worked out 
alone ; Coleridge was interested and appreciative, but always 
critical, and sometimes, as we know, disapproving. Very much 
the same was it with Lamb. He saw too deeply into the 
facts of style to take up the "poetic diction" polemic. When 
the first Lyrical Ballads came out, it was evidently the Ancient 
Mariner that impressed him most. When the second issue 
appeared, he wrote to Wordsworth appreciatively and discrimi- 
natingly ; but still it was the Ancient Mariner that seemed to bulk 



220 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

largest. He told him how much he liked the Lucy poems, the 
" Sexton" and others. He complained of "the common satire upon 
parsons and lawyers in the beginning " of A Poet's Epitaph, and 
" the coarse epithet of * pin-point ' " in the first version of the 
sixth stanza. He objected to the didactic strain in " Tfte Beggar^ 
"The instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like a 
lecture ; they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he 
is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort 
of insult on being told, ' I will teach you how to think upon 
this subject.' This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth 
worse degree to be found in Sterne, and in many novelists and 
modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show 
where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their 
readers to be stupid ; very different from Robinson Crusoe, the 
Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other beautiful, bare 
narratives." "Well and good, Master Charles," Wordsworth 
might have replied ; " but Tristram Shandy is as good and 
lasting stuff as Roderick Random any day." Then Lamb harks 
back to the Mariner. "For me, I was never so affected by 
any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed 
with it for many days." He thought Wordsworth failed to 
appreciate it enough. " I totally differ from your idea that 
the Mariner should have had a character and profession. . . . 
Your other observation is, I think as well, a little unfounded ; 
the Mariner, from being conversant in supernatural events, has 
acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appear- 
ance, etc., which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse 
my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should 
think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of 
dead men that cannot see." And he concludes: "To sum up 
a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one 
poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient Mariner and TJte Mad 
Mother and the Lhies at Tintern Abbey in the first." What was 
unfavourable in this criticism roused Wordsworth to quick self- 
defence, which disgusted Lamb. The most reluctant of letter- 
writers, as Wordsworth professed himself, lost no time. Lamb 
sarcastically observed, in answering this letter. Possibly, he 
was riled by the inaccurate titles given by Lamb to the poems 
he referred to ; anyhow, the less noble side of his egoism seems 
to have shown itself in his letter. He expressed himself as 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 221 

"compelled to wish that my [Lamb's] range of sensibility 
was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should 
receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts." He 
discoursed, in the technical phraseology affected by him, about 
the union of tenderness and imagination, in a way which 
seemed to Lamb to indicate that he put himself above Shake- 
peare. Altogether the critic was punished with " four sweating 
pages" of rebuke and self-exposition. Nor was this all, 
Coleridge sprang to the aid of his collaborator, and inflicted 
on Lamb four more pages, " equally sweaty and more tedious," 
the upshot of which was that, when one did not care for any- 
thing of Wordsworth's, the fault must be one's own. " What," 
exclaimed Lamb, in humorous despair, " am I to do with such 
people ? " Yet, even in this mood. Lamb was far from feeling 
about any of Wordsworth's poetry as Jeffrey did. He thought 
the volume full of originality and observation. He so admired 
" She dwelt among the untrodden ways," as to copy the whole 
of it in a letter. " This," he commented, " is choice and genuine, 
and so are many, many more." But in the volume as a whole 
he felt that there was too deliberate an aim at simplicity. 

Lamb, in truth, was out and out a Londoner ; and his 
sympathies were more concretely human, less abstract and 
rural, than Wordsworth's. Wordsworth invited him to come 
to Grasmere. Lamb's reply, as Mr. Knight has pointed out, 
shows the characteristic differences between the two men. 
Lamb doubted whether he should ever be able to afford so long 
a journey. But that was not all. " Separate from the pleasure 
of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain 
in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have 
formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you 
mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted 
shops of the Strand and Fleet Street ... all the bustle and 
wickedness round about Covent Garden . . . the watchmen, 
drunken scenes, rattles . . . the impossibility of being dull in 
Fleet Street ; the crowds, the very dirt and mud. . . . Steams 
of soups from kitchens ... all those things work themselves 
into my mind, and feed me. ... I often shed tears in the motley 
Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions 
must be strange to you ; so are your rural emotions to me." 
He even feels inclined to pity Wordsworth for his preference. 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make 
friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, 
and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more 
venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and 
tapers. ... I consider the clouds above me but as a roof 
beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind. ... So 
fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, 
as they have been confinedly called ; so ever fresh and green 
and warm are all the inventions of men, and assembling of men, 
in this great city." 

Yet, in thus humorously sharpening the antithesis. Lamb was 
showing himself a more incomplete philosopher than probably 
in reality he was. The Excursion and The Prelude, of course, 
were as yet non-existent ; and no reader of Wordsworth yet 
knew how human, in one sense, the sources of his poetry were. 
But Lamb ought to have recognized the very real, though 
deeply hidden bond, which unites urban and rural phenomena 
in one comprehensive conception of Nature. Lamb's analysis 
of his London pleasure reads like an anticipation of Walt 
Whitman ; and, indeed, it was left for Walt Whitman — in one 
respect, at least, Wordsworth's true continuator — to show that 
the poet's world has no exclusions, and that the Universal 
Spirit, which gives Nature its meaning and charm, is at work 
on the crowded bridge as in the mountain solitude, in the 
thickest press of human toil as much as in remote places where 
men are sparsely sown. 

However, the Lakes did at last draw the Lambs to their 
bosom ; but it was not Wordsworth that they went to see. In 
1802, the year of Wordsworth's marriage, and while he was 
away on the long absence which ended in that event, Charles 
and Mary Lamb paid a surprise visit to Coleridge at Greta 
Hall. While Wordsworth was writing sonnets at Calais, the 
Lambs were making acquaintance with Skiddaw and Blen- 
cathara, and the folded hills between Derwentwater and Butter- 
mere. In a post-chaise they came from Penrith in a glorious 
summer evening, "in a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted 
all the mountains into colours." Such evenings are none too 
common in that land of watery veils ; and there were no more 
fine sunsets, though the Lambs stayed three weeks. Lamb 
found that the beauties of the land spoke to his imagination 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 223 

after all. The weather on the night of arrival was lucky ; and 
then there was the impression of Coleridge's study, with the 
blazing fire which all good Lake dwellers allow themselves in 
the finest summer evenings. The "large antique ill-shaped 
room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big 
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an ^olian harp, 
and an old sofa, half bed, etc." Above all, there was the vast 
bulk of Skiddaw " and his broad-breasted brethren," which 
seems to have dominated Lamb's imagination as well as his 
field of vision. He writes the word " Skiddaw " seven times in 
the course of one not very long letter. He climbed the hill 
with Mary, rejoicing in the walk and the view ; the mountain's 
" fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect 
of mountains all about and about, making you giddy ; and then 
Scotland afar off, and the border countries, so famous in song 
and ballad ! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, 
I am sure, in my life." When first he got back to the Temple 
after all this, Lamb felt small, as though denuded of ideals. 
But he was soon hugging himself as a Londoner again. It 
was better to live in Fleet Street and the Strand than " amidst 
Skiddaw." "After all, I could not live in Skiddaw." "Still, 
Skiddaw is a fine creature." 

In their hospitable way, the Wordsworths allowed the 
Lambs to stay a day or two at Dove Cottage in their absence 
— the Clarksons, whose own dwelling was near Ullswater, 
doing the housekeeping. But it was in London, after their 
return, that Charles and Mary saw the Wordsworths that year. 
The Wordsworths dined with them at the Temple, and the 
Lambs took them to see some of the sights. A month or two 
later, Charles was forwarding, in a parcel to Coleridge, books 
which Wordsworth had left behind, and " strange thick-hoofed 
shoes which are very much admired in London." We can fancy 
the look of them ! 

The Lambs never again ventured as far as Lakeland ; and 
future intercourse with Wordsworth was all in London, during 
the poet's fairly frequent visits. The friendship was established ; 
and so was the cordial literary appreciation — on Lamb's part 
always without infatuation or even glamour. As in the friend- 
ship with De Quincey, Dorothy was a powerful link. There 
was much similarity between Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary 



224 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Lamb ; both were gifted and literary ; both had quick sensi- 
bilities and rare powers of intellectual sympathy ; in both, alas ! 
the nervous mechanism broke down under the strain of thought 
and feeling. One of the most touching of Charles Lamb's 
letters is to Dorothy in the summer of 1805, during one of his 
sister's absences through mental illness. To no one else did he 
ever so completely lay open the sad recurrent wound. It seems 
almost profanation to quote from, or even to publish, such utter- 
ance ; the agonizing love, the distracting perplexity, the broken 
and the contrite heart (for Lamb knew that his own part in the 
dual life was sadly flawed), which surely in this case would not 
be despised. He tenderly quotes some pretty verses of his 
sister's, and concludes : " This is a little unfair, to tell so much 
about ourselves, and to advert so little to your letter, so full 
of comfortable tidings of you all. . . . That you may go on 
recovering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary's 
recovery." 

Twelve years later, when the Lambs moved into Russell 
Street, Covent Garden, we find Mary writing lovingly to 
Dorothy, and wishing that " Rydal Mount, with all its inhabi- 
tants enclosed," could be transplanted into the midst of Covent 
Garden, "I hope we shall meet," she goes on, "before the 
walking faculties of either of us fail ; you say you can walk 
fifteen miles with ease, [people used to think Dorothy over- 
walked herself into premature senility] that is exactly my stint, 
and more fatigues me." 

Charles Lamb was quick to congratulate Wordsworth on 
the birth of his son Thomas in 1806; and he promptly took 
him into his confidence about the failure of his farce, Mr. H., 
as also about his and Mary's better-starred enterprise, the Tales 
from Shakespeare. He never lost his sense of a certain self- 
blindness, a certain conceit, in Wordsworth ; he never considered 
himself as much his partisan as Coleridge was. Thus, in 1808, 
just before a London visit of Wordsworth's, we find Lamb 
writing : '* Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to town ; he 
is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does 
not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had 
a mind to try it. It is clear, then, nothing is wanting but the 
mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this hardihood of 
assertion." 



\ 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE'' 225 

Yet we must not make too much of such little asides. 
Lamb knew Wordsworth's magnitude, and was not backward to 
acknowledge it. Even about the Convention of Cintra pamphlet 
he was enthusiastic. " Its power over me," he wrote to Cole- 
ridge, " was like that which Milton's pamphlets must have had 
on his contemporaries, who were tuned to them. What a piece 
of prose ! " 

When Tlie Excursion came out in 1814, Lamb praised it 
heartily, as we shall see in the last chapter. 

Then, in 181 5, came the first collective edition of the poems, 
with one of the critical essays. Now was Lamb's first intro- 
duction to such things as Laodamia and Thej'e is a Yew-tree ; 
and now, indeed, he bowed his head. For the moment, and in 
addressing Wordsworth himself, he came very near enrolling 
himself with the Wordsworthians proper. He was afraid 
Wordsworth would concede even an image or a phrase to the 
conventional critics. "I would not have had you offer up the 
poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little 
Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice ; I would not have 
given *em a red cloak to save their souls." Yet it is all, of 
course, contemporary criticism of a contemporary ; it is not 
the homage of posterity to a classic, which, in the nature of 
the case, is a very different matter. He cannot resist his joke. 
What is good for a bootless bene? he suddenly asked Mary, as 
he turned the pages. A shoeless pea, she promptly replied. 
With Wordsworth's discourse on imagination. Lamb professed 
himself satisfied. 

Wh.Qn Peter Bell \^2is published in 1819, Lamb complained 
of it as being too lyrical. It is not quite clear what he means 
by the word in this connection. He seems to have specially 
resented the form of the poem, by which a group of people, 
" The Vicar and his Dame," " Stephen Otter," and the rest, are 
interposed between the poet and his reader ; but there is 
nothing lyrical in such a form. He said, in 181 1, to Henry 
Crabb Robinson, the delightful diarist, and most literary of 
barristers, in the course of a conversation in which he asserted 
Coleridge's superiority to Wordsworth, that Wordsworth forced 
the reader to submit to his individual feelings, instead of, like 
Shakespeare, becoming everything he pleased. The evidential 
value of reported talk is very slight: so much depends on 
Q 



226 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

context, on tone, and a score of things which the diarist does not 
or cannot record. The above dictum^ as it stands, is so dis- 
creditable to Lamb's critical power, that one feels something 
essential must be left out. Certainly the critical honours were 
with Crabb Robinson, when he rejoined that this so-called 
inferiority " lay very much in the lyrical character." Still, 
Lamb must have said something of the sort ; and it is probably 
true that Wordsworth was "too lyrical," too abstract, too 
egoistic — in the sense in which all lyrical poetry tends to be 
egoistic — to ravish the heart of one so dramatic and concretely 
human as the Fleet Street-loving Charles Lamb. 

Lamb had a great fancy for another humorously didactic 
poem of Wordsworth's, The Waggoner, It had been written in 
1805, and Lamb had seen it in manuscript. He persuaded 
Wordsworth to publish it immediately after Peter Bell ; and the 
poet pleased him by a gracious, though very temperate, dedica- 
tory letter, in which he acknowledged the pleasure he had 
derived from Lamb's writings, and the "high esteem" with 
which he was truly his. (We must remember that there were 
as yet no Essays of Elia, and that the only writings of Lamb's 
from which Wordsworth, in 18 19, could derive pleasure, were 
Rosamond Gray, John Woodvill, some of the Tales from 
Shakespeare, the notes to the Specimens of Dramatic Poetry, 
and one or two critical essays.) Lamb did well, certainly, to 
unearth the story, so delightfully and so humorously told, of the 
thirsty carter and his toiling team ; he rightly praised the 
"beautiful tolerance" of the poem. For, alas! Benjamin, the 
waggoner, was, as we have hinted, and as Burns would have 
called him, a " drouthy neebor " ; and every inn between 
Ambleside and Keswick was for him a door into the nether 
regions. The poem follows him on one of his northward 
journeys, full of good resolutions ; past the " Dove and Olive 
Bough " at Town End, past the " Swan " at Grasmere, his virtue 
as yet quite safe. But on the ascent of the Raise, there is a 
bewildering thunderstorm in the hot June night, and the 
waggoner forgathers with a sailor and his wife. The sailor 
has a donkey, and his wife a baby ; and the two storm-stressed 
parties join together, the woman and her child safe under the 
hood of the waggon. As they pass Wytheburn, on the drop to 
Thirlmere, the fatal sounds of fiddling issue from the " Cherry 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 227 

Tree," and Benjamin's virtue gives way under the new 
strain. 

" Nor has thought time to come and go, 

To vibrate between yes and no ; 

For, cries the Sailor, * Glorious chance 

That blows us hither ! — let him dance. 

Who can or will ! — my honest soul, 

Our treat shall be a friendly bowl ! ' 

He draws him to the door, ' Come in, 

Come, come,' cries he to Benjamin ! 

And Benjamin — ah, woe is me ! 

Gave the word — the horses heard 

And halted, though reluctantly." 

After some flowing bowls have circulated, the sailor goes out, 
and returns with a wonderful model of a man-of-war — the 
Vanguard, flagship at the Battle of the Nile ; and at sight of it, 
and of the very spot where Nelson stood, the fiddlers and the 
dancers cease, and you might hear a mouse nibble. But then, 
on Benjamin's motion, they must drink to the great admiral, 
though the very mastiff", chained under the waggon outside, 
rattles his chain in protest. After two hours of this kind of 
thing, the cavalcade starts again for the run by the lake, the 
mastiff" and the donkey tied side by side, much to their mutual 
inconvenience, and the — 

" Vanguard, following close behind, 
Sails spread, as if to catch the wind ! " 

At last come the signs of morning ; the waking of the birds 
in St. John's Vale ; the rosy light on Skiddaw. Here lies the 
imaginative value of the poem ; in the contrast and antagonism 
so subtly indicated, between the nocturnal pleasures of the 
" Cherry Tree," and the beauties of the morning. 

" The mists, that o'er the streamlet's bed 
Hung low, begin to rise and spread ; 
Even while I speak, their skirts of grey 
Are smitten by a silver ray ; 
And lo ! — up Castrigg's naked steep 
(Where, smoothly urged, the vapours sweep 
Along — and scatter and divide, 
Like fleecy clouds self-multiplied) 
The stately waggon, is ascending. 
With faithful Benjamin attending. 
Apparent now beside his team — 
Now lost amid a glittering steam : 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

And with him goes his Sailor-friend, 
By this time near their journey's end ; 
And, after their high-minded riot, 
Sickening into thoughtful quiet ; 
As if the morning's pleasant hour 
Had for their joys a killing power. 
And, sooth, for Benjamin a vein 
Is opened of still deeper pain 
As if his heart by notes were stung 
From out the lowly hedge-rows flung ; 
As if the Warbler lost in light 
Reproved his soarings of the night." 

The dinotiment may be fancied ; the wrath of Benjamin's 
master at the fresh outbreak ; the enigmatical appearance of 
the party, and the Waggoner's final dismissal. 

" All past forgiveness is repealed ; 
And thus, and through distempered blood 
On both sides, Benjamin the good. 
The patient, and the tender-hearted. 
Was from his team and waggon parted ; 
When duty of that day was o'er, 
Laid down his whip — and served no more." 

Excellent as The Waggoner is, Wordsworth was right when 
he felt that in Peter Bell there were " a higher tone of imagina- 
tion " and " deeper touches of feeling." Lamb sturdily preferred 
The Waggoner ; partly, perhaps, because (and, indeed, so he 
plainly hints) he was himself sensitive to Benjamin's temptations. 
"Methinks there is a kind of shadowing affinity between the 
subject of the narrative and the subject of the dedication." 

The Lambs' modest London dwellings continued to be 
regular resorts of Wordsworth as the years went on, and the 
friendship never felt the passage of a single cloud. There is a 
delightful letter of Charles's to Dorothy Wordsworth, dated 
November 25, 18 19, in which the writer describes his experiences 
in introducing little Willy Wordsworth, the poet's youngest 
child, now a boy of nine, to the London sights. " Till yester- 
day," Lamb writes, " I had barely seen him [Willy], but yes- 
terday he gave us his small company to a bullock's heart, and 
I can pronounce him a lad of promise. . . . He has observation, 
and seems thoroughly awake. . . . Being taken over Waterloo 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE'' 229 

Bridge, he remarked, that if we had no mountains, we had a fine 
river at least ; which was a touch of the comparative : but then 
he added, in a strain which argued less for his future abilities as 
a political economist, that he supposed they must take at least 
a pound a week toll. Like a curious naturalist, he inquired if 
the tide did not come up a little salty. . . . He put another 
question, as to the flux and reflux ; which being rather cunningly 
evaded than artfully solved by that she-Aristotle, Mary — who 
muttered something about its getting up an hour sooner and 
sooner every day — he sagely replied, 'Then it must come to 
the same thing at last ; ' which was a speech worthy of an 
infant Halley! The lion in the 'Change by no means came up 
to his ideal standard ; so impossible is it for Nature, in any of 
her works, to come up to the standard of a child's imagination ! 
. . . William's genius, I take it, leans a little to the figurative ; 
for, being at play at tricktrack (a kind of minor billiard-table, 
which we keep for smaller wights, and sometimes refresh our 
own mature fatigues with taking a hand at), not being able to 
hit a ball he had iterate aimed at, he cried out, ' I cannot hit 
that beast ! ' Now the balls are usually called men, but he 
felicitously hit upon a middle term ; a term of approximation 
and imaginative reconciliation ; a something where the two 
ends of the brute matter (ivory), and their human and rather 
violent personification into men, might meet, as I take it — 
illustrative of that excellent remark, in a certain preface, about 
imagination, explaining, ' Like a sea-beast that had crawled 
forth to sun himself!'* Not that I accuse William Minor of 
hereditary plagiary, or conceive the image to have come ex traduce. 
Rather he seemeth to keep aloof from any source of imitation, 
and purposely to remain ignorant of what mighty poets have 
done in this kind before him ; for, being asked if his father had 
ever been on Westminster Bridge, he answered that he did not 
know ! " t 

In 1820 began the last and most fruitful section of Charles 
Lamb's life ; for it was in August of that year that the first 
essay signed " Elia " came out in the London Magazine — the 

* The echo of a phrase from Resoluticn and Independence. 

t The allusion, of course, is to Wordworth's great sonnet, beginning — 

" Earth has not anything to show more fair." 



230 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

vehicle, as we remember, of the Confessions of an English Opium- 
Eater. The world will always know and love Lamb as the essayist 
and letter-writer — the essayist in him being .but the letter-writer 
transfigured, — the revealer, under the restraint of a dignified 
tradition, and on the impulse of mature literary power, of the 
rich, quaint, lovable personality already well known to his corre- 
spondents. Month after month the exquisite essays stole 
forth, " taking " the air with their fragrance — a fragrance like 
that of the old Spectator, but deeper, sweeter, subtler ; with the 
Addisonian grace and humour, and unspoiled by the Addisonian 
woodenness, the Addisonian conventionalism. The Essays of 
Elia, appearing when they did, formed one of the best links 
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having all the 
sanity, the lucidity, the placid reflectiveness of the past age, and 
much of the freshness, the truer pathos, the purer humour, the 
courageous individuality, the lyrical charm, of the new. If one 
cannot speak of Lamb as exhibiting the " Renascence of 
Wonder " in the strict sense of the words, one can most 
literally describe him as a child of the Romantic Revival. 

Fourteen years — no more — passed between the first Essay of 
Elia and Charles Lamb's quiet death at Edmonton in 1834. 
A large part of the charm of the essays lies in their directly 
autobiographical character ; in the portrayal, absolutely faithful 
under every alias, of the writer, his relations, his friends, the 
scenery of the different stages of his life. Delicious summer days 
in Hertfordshire, nourishing the dreamy bookish childhood ; the 
cloisters of Christ's and the purlieus of the Temple ; holiday- 
rambles to Margate, to Oxford, but seldom very far afield; the 
love-tragedy, with the rainbow-faces of " dream-children " 
heightening it. Mary, needing hardly any of her brother's 
idealism to deepen the pathos and heighten the charm of the 
figure ; evenings over books or whist ; occasional visits to the play ; 
such is the stuff of the essays. Their chief scenery is furnished 
by the streets of London ; and through them all we never lose 
sight of the spare, knee-breeched figure with the curling hair and 
dark, high-nosed, Jewish-looking face, the courteous manners, 
the ready smile, and the incurable stammer, day by day walking 
swiftly eastwards to his clerk's work at the India House, and 
westward or north-westward again in the late afternoon to quiet 
literary or social evenings. More and more irksome became the 




^'^M^ 

'^i^: 



CHARLES LAMB (AGED ABOUT 50) 

FROM THE DRAWING liV THOMAS WAGEMAN IX 1S24 OR 1S25 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 231 

clerkly drudgery, until at last, in 1825, it was got rid of, and 
Lamb could escape to more country surroundings, first at 
Enfield, then at Edmonton. In those later years the intercourse 
with 'the Wordsworths was more intermittent, and the corre- 
spondence flagged." But it was none the less congenial. " I 
wish," wrote Dorothy to Crabb Robinson, in the year after 
Lamb's retirement ; " I wish they [the Lambs] would now and 
then let us see their handwriting ; a single page from Charles 
Lamb is worth ten postages." There were occasional letters, 
occasional meetings ; and the friendship was strong as death. 
One or two of the richest and most vivid of Lamb's latest letters 
are to Wordsworth. In January, 1830, he writes describing the 
lights and shadows of his superannuated life in Enfield lodgings. 
On the whole, the shadows predominate. " There are not now 
the years that there used to be. . . We have taken a farewell 
of the pompous troublesome life called housekeeping. . . . We 
have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them ; with the 
garden, but to see it grow ; with the tax-gatherer, but to hear him 
knock. . . . We are fed, we know not how ; quietists — confiding 
ravens. ... In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake, and 
cry to sleep again. . . . What have I gained by health ? In- 
tolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals ? 
A total blank." He hits off Enfield : " A little teazing image of 
a town . . . shops two yards square, half-a-dozen apples, and 
two penn'orth of overlooked ginger-bread ... a circulating 
library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's 
Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels 
[so the Waverleys were often called in those days] has not yet 
travelled — (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the 
Redgauntlet), to have a new plastered flat church, and to be 
wishing that it was but a cathedral ! The very blackguards here 
are degenerate." One supposes that Lamb always loved to sing 
the praises of London in the pastoral Wordsworth's ear. 
Wordsworth's eyesight gave him much trouble. " From my 
den I return you condolence for your decaying sight ; not for 
anything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the 
pleasure of reading a London newspaper. . . . The last long time 
I heard from you, you had knocked your head against something. 
Do not do so ; for your head (I do not flatter) is not a knob, or 
the top of a brass nail, or the end of a nine-pin — unless a 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Vulcanian hammer could fairly batter a * Recluse ' out of it ; 
then would I bid the smirched god knock, and knock lustily, the 
two-handed skinker." 

Three years later, he writes under new shadows, shadows 
admitting of no humorous exaggeration. The mental cloud 
that was never to lift was falling on Dorothy Wordsworth, and 
Mary was again very ill. " Her illnesses," he wrote, " encroach 
yearly . , . half her life she is dead to me, and the other half 
is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next 
shock. ... I see little of her. . . . Stmt lachrymce rermn ! and 
you and I must bear it." 

In this letter, Lamb thanks Wordsworth for his "cordial 
reception oi Elia." We possess the letter to which Lamb's was 
a reply. Wordsworth had written — " I have to thank you and 
Moxon for a delightful volume, not, I hope, your last, of Elia. 
I have read it all, except some of the popular fallacies which I 
reserve, not to get through my cake all at once. ... I am not 
sure but I like the Old China and The Wedding as well as any 
of the essays. I read Love me and love my Dog to my sister 
this morning. . . . She was much pleased." 

In the February before Lamb's death he wrote his last 
surviving letter to Wordsworth. It is short, and its theme is of 
transitory interest, but one or two phrases make it immortal 
for us here. He asked Wordsworth to help a prot^gie at Carlisle. 
" O, if you can recommend her, how would I love you — if I 
could love you better ! . . . Moxon tells me you would like a 
letter from me ; you shall have one. This I cannot mingle up 
with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from C. Lamb. 
Need he add loves to wife, sister, and all ? Poor Mary is ill 
again, after a short lucid interval of four or five months. . . . 
Good you are to me. Yours, with fervour of friendship, for 
ever." 

In July, 1834, Coleridge died at Highgate. The death was 
saddening to Wordsworth, but shattering to Lamb. Words- 
worth and Coleridge had hardly met for twenty years ; yet, as 
Wordsworth told Coleridge's son, " his mind has been habitually 
present with me." To Lamb, the loss of Coleridge was the loss 
of a vital part of himself. He has recorded that he heard of the 
death " without grief " ; but that was only because the hurt was 
*' too deep for tears." Coleridge's spirit haunted him, bringing 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 233 

an acute sense of desolation. " I cannot think a thought, I 
cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual 
turning and reference to him." He would suddenly exclaim, in 
the midst of ordinary conversation, when the fact gripped him, 
Coleridge is dead! He was not long to suffer under the de- 
privation. In December, 1834, his own hour struck. A trip on 
the road, a fall, a slight face-wound ; then some hours' erysipelas; 
and Charles Lamb was gone. Mary was too ill to realize what 
had happened. 

Dorothy Wordsworth also could hardly realize the event. 
But Wordsworth himself bore noble tribute to it. In 1835, he 
wrote a poem commemorating Lamb, and in after years a kind 
of prose appreciation, by way of preface. Moxon had asked for 
an epitaph or elegy ; and Wordsworth immediately, with his 
habitual fluency, wrote a series of verses which could not be 
inscribed on Lamb's gravestone, partly because of their length, 
partly because of the intimacy of their revelations. If the 
" epitaph " is not one of Wordsworth's greatest poems, it at least 
contains some admirable appreciation, at once sympathetic and 
discriminating, of Lamb. Wordsworth truly loved his odd 
London friend, though he regretted some of his characteristics, 
his unwise conviviality, and what, to the grave, scantily humorous 
poet, seemed his over-indulged quizzicality. His tendency to 
banter seemed to show a lack of sincerity. Wordsworth 
thought that both Coleridge and he had learned a kind of 
superficial untruthfulness of mind at Christ's. 

Yet, when Lamb died, it was his goodness that stood out 
before Wordsworth's mind in strongest relief. 

" To a good Man of most dear memory 
This Stone is sacred." 

Faults he had, as we all have ; yet he was, before all things, 
innocent, like the creature whose name he bore. 

" From the most gentle creature nursed in fields 
Had been derived the name he bore — a name, 
Wherever Christian altars have been raised, 
Hallowed to meekness and to innocence ; 
And if in him meekness at times gave way, 
Provoked out of herself by troubles strange, 
Many and strange, that hung about his life ; 
Still, at the centre of his being, lodged 
A soul by resignation sanctified : 



234 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

And if too often, self-reproached, he felt 
That innocence belongs not to our kind, 
A power that never ceased to abide in him, 
Charity, 'mid the multitude of sins 
That she can cover, left not his exposed 
To an unforgiving judgment firom just Heaven. 
Oh, he was good, if e'er a good Man lived ! " 

His genius is admirably characterized ; his — 

" Knowledge and wisdom, gained from converse sweet 
With books, or while he ranged the crowded streets 
With a keen eye, and overflowing heart," 

pouring out — 

" Truth in works by thoughtful love 
Inspired — works potent over smiles and tears, 
And, as round mountain-tops the lightning plays, 
Thus innocently sported, breaking forth 
As from a cloud of some grave sympathy. 
Humour and wild instinctive wit, and all 
The vivid flashes of his spoken words." 

The poet cannot forget Lamb's scorn of the country ; but he 
recognizes that it was only half sincere, and he feels no unfitness 
in his burial in a rural place. 

" Thou wert a scorner of the fields, my Friend, 
But more in show than truth ; and from the fields. 
And from the mountains, to thy rural grave 
Transported, my soothed spirit hovers o'er 
The green untrodden turf, and blowing flowers." 

The wonderful bond between brother and sister, itself a 
great poem, is amply celebrated in Wordsworth's lines. Mary 
Lamb, ten years her brother's senior, had at first been to him 
as a mother. 

" When years 

Lifting the boy to man's estate, had called 

The long-protected to assume the part 

Of the protector, the first filial tie 

Was undissolved ; and, in or out of sight. 

Remained imperishably interwoven 

With life itself." 

In spite of all the adversity and tragedy, Mary was — 

" The meek, 
The self-restraining, and the ever-kind ; " 

and — 

" Thro' all visitations and all trials," 



"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 235 

the brother and sister were faithful ; 

" Like two vessels launched 
From the same beach one ocean to explore 
With mutual help, and sailing — to their league 
True, as inexorable winds, or bars 
Floating or fixed of polar ice, allow." 

And the lines end worthily on the image of the two-in-one — 

" O gift divine of quiet sequestration ! 
The hermit, exercised in prayer and praise, 
And feeding daily on the hope of heaven, 
Is happy in his vow . . . but happier far 
Was to your souls, and, to the thoughts of others, 
A thousand times more beautiful appeared, 
Your dual loneliness. The sacred tie 
Is broken ; yet why grieve ? for Time but holds 
His moiety in trust." 

With the truth and love of this careful tribute we are well 
satisfied. But perhaps the phrase in the Extempore Effusion on 
the Death of James Hogg written in the same year, the phrase 
dedicated to Lamb, in the stanzas sacred to him and to Coleridge, 
speaks with equal truth and a deeper tenderness. 

" Nor has the roUing year twice measured 
From sign to sign its steadfast course, 
Since every mortal power of Coleridge 
Was frozen at its marvellous source ; 

" The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, 
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth j 
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle. 
Has vanished from his lonely hearth." 



CHAPTER XI 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND CHRISTOPHER NORTH 

IT is tempting to compare and contrast Wordsworth and 
Walter Scott. Born within a year of one another, both 
men were burly, honest northerners ; both were intense patriots ; 
both were chivalrously devoted to literature ; both were great 
literary originators and reformers. Nor was this all. Both, in 
a remarkable degree, gave spiritual significance to the regions 
in which their lots were cast. To a greater extent than any 
other single man, Scott gave Scotland, topographical Scotland, 
modern Scotland, a soul. He revealed it to the world, not as 
a guide-book, but as a poet, does. And, similarly, Wordsworth 
was much more than a dweller among the Lakes ; he became 
the very " breath and finer spirit " of them all ; in his genius 
they live and have their being. 

The parallelism can hardly be extended. As poets, indeed, 
Wordsworth and Scott were nearer than they knew, and than 
Wordsworth's rather scornful estimate allowed ; nearer in their 
lyrical strain, nearer in their feeling for Nature. * But their 
intellectual methods were essentially dissimilar. Wordsworth 
was intensely subjective, Scott cheerily and self-effacingly objec- 
tive. Wordsworth never wrote without looking into his own 
thinking and feeling interior ; Scott wrote only about an 
external world, conceived by him as such, and nothing more. 
All his life Scott was looking on at a splendid pageantry, and 
showing it to mankind, he himself being a mere showman, 
hardly visible. For Wordsworth, too, there was a pageant — a 
pageant of Nature, a pageant of Man ; but it was mysteriously 
unrolled out of his own intelligence and imagination ; exter- 
nality supplied only raw material and stimulus. So far from 
being self-effacing, Wordsworth had much of that egoism which, 

236 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 237 

as Coleridge said about Milton, is a revelation of spirit — spirit 
which is universal. In a word, Wordsworth was a philosopher ; 
Scott was not. 

Again, in Romanticism they took widely different ways. 
Except in parts of his poetry, those parts most lyrically inspired, 
and except in his Scottish character-drawing, Scott, in his 
Romanticism, never got much beyond the mere idealization of 
medievalism and feudalism. "Gothicism" of this kind was 
never much to Wordsworth. His point of view was too universal 
to incline him to it ; it was too heavily laden with trappings 
and tinsel for his naked simplicity of taste. Even the Ancient 
Mariner, the most arrestingly distinctive of Lyrical Ballads, was 
too romantic for him. As the Ancient Mariner \s to the Tintern 
Abbey lines, so — we may put it — was the Romanticism which 
Scott practised to the romance of Wordsworth. 

Yet the two great pioneers were excellent friends. Scott 
was sweetly, wholly, loyal to, and admiring of, Wordsworth ; 
Wordsworth, though he sniffed at Scott's poetry, and almost 
ignored his novels, loved the man, and felt, in spite of himself, 
his greatness. They met for the first time in 1803, the year 
when Wordsworth first set foot in Scotland. It was a great 
year in Wordsworth's life, not only because he first saw Scott 
and Scotland, but because he found there one of the critical 
inspirations of his poetry. It was a great year also in Dorothy's 
life, because she was her brother's companion, and has left her 
impressions in a diary which is a kind of Wordsworthian prose- 
poem. In August, 1803, they set out with Coleridge, Mrs. 
Wordsworth staying at home with her two-months'-old first 
baby. Coleridge played his wonted unsatisfactory part in the 
expedition. He was, as Wordsworth said, " in bad spirits, and 
somewhat too much in love with his own dejection." He got 
as far as Loch Lomond ; but in the third week of the tour, the 
abundant and apparently endless Scottish rains in a west 
country August so completed his dejection that at Tarbet he 
"determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh and make the 
best of his way thither." They left Arrochar all together. 
" Coleridge accompanied us a little way ; we portioned out the 
contents of our purse before our parting ; and, after we had lost 
sight of him, drove heavily along." So Dorothy wrote. We 
may be sure that the heaviness was not caused by mud alone. 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Many a sigh Coleridge drew from that sympathetic heart from 
first to last. In the solemn recesses of Glen Croe her thoughts 
were "full of Coleridge," and the image of him "sickly and 
alone" was as depressing as the savage place in the bleak 
weather. 

Coleridge apart, the tour was a bright success. The travellers 
progressed at their leisure, in an Irish car drawn by one not too 
amiable horse, by way of Carlisle to Dumfries, Here Words- 
worth did homage to Burns, who had lain just seven years in 
his grave in St. Michael's kirkyard, no stone as yet marking the 
place. He did his utmost towards a just estimate of his great 
predecessor. He wrote three poems in Burns's own characteristic 
metre, in which moral, hardly, if at all, outweighs literary, criti- 
cism. The spiritual kinship between himself and the Scottish 
lyrist he fully recognizes. They were "true friends, though 
diversely inclined." As he looked across the Solway to the dim 
heights of Skiddaw, he regretted that he had not known Burns. 

" Huge Criffel's hoary top ascends 
By Skiddaw seen ; 
Neighbours we were, and loving friends 

We might have been." 

In a nobler verse he bore his tribute to Burns's share in the 
renascence of British poetry. It was Burns 

" Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 
And showed my youth 
How Verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth." 

Up Nithsdale, past Ellisland, the party went, still thinking of 
Burns. The place was alive with his genius. Wordsworth puts 
to Nature a question about Burns's poetry which we may 
perhaps put about his own. " Let us pause," he says — 

" And ask of Nature, from what cause 
And by what rules 
She trained her Burns to win applause 
That shames the Schools." 

He thinks of him much as Shelley thought of Keats in Adonais 
as " made one with Nature." 

" He rules 'mid winter snows, and when 
Bees fill their hives." 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 239 

Then come stanzas of moral reflection and regret, much too 
instinct with charity to be didactic — 

" Sweet Mercy ! to the gates of Heaven 
This Minstrel lead, his sins forgiven ; 
The rueflil conflict, the heart riven 

With vain endeavour, 
And memoiy of Earth's bitter leaven, 

Effaced for ever. 

" But why to Him confine the prayer, 
When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear 
On the frail heart the purest share 

With all that live ?— 
The best of what we do and are, 
Just God, forgive ! " 

It was before Coleridge left the Wordsworths that they 
encountered at Inversnaid, on Loch Lomond, that Highland 
girl who lives for ever in one of Wordsworth's most exquisite 
poems — exquisite because the whole range of poetry hardly 
affords a stronger instance of nearly sexless lyrical rapture 
where sex-feeling might be strong. It was by Loch Katrine 
that the mysterious " Stepping Westward " question was put 
and answered. Then by Loch Awe and Kilchurn Castle, the 
"child of loud-throated war," with a glimpse of Mull; across 
through Perthshire to Edinburgh ; then southward to the 
Tweed. They arrived at Edinburgh on September 15. Walter 
Scott was at this time an active and gifted young advocate of 
thirty-two, the Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a great love of 
ballads, German and British, and a vast multifarious knowledge 
of the antiquities and poetic lore of the Border country, which 
he had embodied two years previously in the Minstrelsy \of the 
Scottish Border. With his wife and children he lived at Lass- 
wade, near Edinburgh ; and there, in that early home, Scott 
and Wordsworth had their first meeting. Their first night in 
Edinburgh the Wordsworths spent at the White Hart in the 
Grassmarket, "which we conjectured," wrote Dorothy, "would 
better suit us than one in a more fashionable part of the town." 
Friday, i6th, was a wet day, and, in a city in which so much 
depends on distant views, this was unlucky for the sightseers. 
" The Firth of Forth was entirely hidden from us, and all distant 
objects, and we strained our eyes till they ached, vainly trying 



240 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

to pierce through the thick mist." Nevertheless, " Edinburgh 
far surpassed all expectation." 

That evening they went to Rosslyn to sleep ; and on the 
Saturday morning, fine after the rain, they walked through 
Hawthornden to Lasswade. The Wordsworths were early folk, 
like all tourists in new places ; and when they knocked at 
Walter Scott's door, neither he nor his wife was up. They had 
to wait in a large sitting-room ; but at last the Sheriff came in 
with his limp and his burr and his hearty manner — his " grave 
cordiality," as Wordsworth called it. The guests had breakfast 
with the Scotts, and stayed until two o'clock, when Scott 
accompanied them back to Rosslyn. We can fancy from what 
stores the Sheriff would pour forth his delightful talk, and how 
memorable he would make those hours. Wordsworth was 
struck, as in after years he always was, with Scott's modesty ; his 
cheerfulness, his benevolence, his hopeful views of man and the 
world. And he was privileged to hear, that day, the first four 
cantos of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was not to be 
published for two years, " partly read and partly recited, some- 
times in an enthusiastic style of chant." Wordsworth was 
" greatly delighted " by the ** novelty of the manners, the clear 
picturesque descriptions, and the easy, glowing energy of much 
of the verse." Would that there had always been the same 
appreciative note in his criticism of Scott's poetry ! 

The Wordsworths were going south to see the Tweed and 
the storied places through which it flows ; and Scott, too, was 
on the point of starting for the Jedburgh Assizes. They struck 
Tweed at Peebles, and there, on a Sunday morning, Words- 
worth wrote the sonnet of rebuke to the "unworthy Lord" 
Douglas for felling the trees that clothed the nakedness of 
Neidpath Castle — a wrong 

" Which Nature scarcely seems to heed ; 
For shelter'd places, bosoms, nooks, and bays, 
And the pure mountains, and the gentle Tweed, 
And the green silent pastures yet remain." 

They slept at Clovenford that night, and made the memorable 
decision to leave Yarrow unvisited, though Dorothy keenly 
wished to see the haunted stream. 

" Then said my winsome Marrow, 
' Whate'er betide we'll turn aside 
And see the Braes of Yarrow.' " 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 241 

Her brother's exquisite, if fallacious, dialectic, carried the day. 

" Let beeves and home-bred kine partake 
The sweets of Burnmill Meadow, 
The swan on still St. Mary's Lake 
Float double, swan and shadow. 
We will not see them, will not go 
To-day nor yet to-morrow ; 
Enough if in our hearts we know 
There's such a place as Yarrow." 

On Monday morning to Melrose ; and there, on their way to 
the Abbey after breakfast, they met Scott in the street, and he 
went with them. What an opportunity, and what a guide ! — 
though the ruins were "flouted" by "gay beams," and not 
glimmering in moonshine. 

" The pillar'd arches were over their head, 
And beneath their feet were the bones of the dead." 

All that day the two poets were together and even all the 
following night ; for they slept in the same room at the inn. 
Next day Scott went on to Jedburgh, and the Wordsworths 
followed the river to Dryburgh, where Scott's body was one day 
to be laid. They intended to go on to Kelso, but late September 
rains drove them to Jedburgh, where they were again with 
Scott. They lodged with that excellent and young-hearted 
" Matron of Jedborough and her Husband " who are immortal 
in Wordsworth's verse. It was the wife who, though over 
seventy, would not grow old ; the husband was a speechless 
wreck — 

" With legs that move not, if they can. 

And useless arms, a trunk of man, 

He sits, and with a vacant eye ; 

A sight to make a stranger sigh ! 



The joyous Woman is the Mate 
Of him in that forlorn estate ! 

He is as mute as Jedborough Tower ! 
She jocund as it was of yore 
With all its bravery on ; in times 
When all alive with merry chimes, 
Upon a sun-bright morn of May, 
It roused the Vale to holiday." 

The merry old dame is to Wordsworth as eloquent from the 

R 



242 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

heart of Nature, as the Highland Girl herself. Her's was no 
thoughtless gaiety born of inexperience of pain ; she had known 
suffering both of body and mind. When you talked to her, 
there were times when 

" Some inward trouble suddenly 
Broke from the Matron's strong black eye — 
A remnant of uneasy light, 
A flash of something over-bright ! " 

But it was for a moment only ; victorious and wholesome joy 
soon reasserted itself. The poet learned his lesson about the 
potentialities of old age. 

" I praise thee, Matron ! and thy due 
Is praise, heroic praise, and true ! 
With admiration I behold 
Thy gladness unsubdued and bold ! 
Thy looks, thy gestures, all present 
The picture of a life well spent : 
This do I see ; and something more ; 
A strength unthought of heretofore ! 
Delighted am I for thy sake ; 
And yet a higher joy partake : 
Our Human-nature throws away 
Its second twilight, and looks gay ; 
A land of promise and of pride 
Unfolding, wide as life is wide." 

Those were pleasant days at Jedburgh ; the Sheriff would 
come to supper when the Court rose, and go on reciting the Lay ; 
or he would join the brother and sister in their rambles by the 
woody Jed, or knee-deep in the ferns of Ferniehurst, which 
reminded Dorothy of Alfoxden. Young Will Laidlaw, too, 
was there, "as shy," Dorothy found, "as any of our Grasmere 
lads." He had a farm in Yarrow, and a poet's soul, and was 
eager to see Wordsworth. He was to write " Lucy's Flittin' " 
and other sweet genuine Scottish vernacular lyrics ; to be Scott's 
land-steward and atnanti^nsis at Abbotsford, and to try to help 
his helplessness at the last. " Ha ! Willie Laidlaw ! " the dying 
man collected himself to exclaim, when they set him down in 
the dining-room at Abbotsford after the sad time abroad and in 
London : " O man, how often have I thought of you ! " 

Scott accompanied the travellers in their car from Jedburgh 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 243 

to Hawick, the " Jedborough Matron " supplying sandwiches 
and cheesecakes for the journey. Scott pointed out Ruberslaw 
and Minto Crags, and had some story about nearly every house 
they passed. This was the last day of his company ; next 
morning they parted at Hawick, after a wistful look from the 
top of a hill toward Scott's and Dandle Dinmont's Liddesdale. 
The Scottish tour was over ; two days later the Wordsworths 
were at Dove Cottage again with Mary and Joanna Hutchinson, 
and little Johnny asleep in a clothes-basket by the fire. 

Here was the making of a mighty friendship ! Writing to 
Scott a week or two later, Wordsworth used strong words about 
it. " My sister and I often talk of the happy days that we spent 
in your company. Such things do not occur often in life. 
If we live, we shall meet again. That is my consolation, when 
I think of these things. Scotland and England sound like 
division, do what we can ; but we really are but neighbours, and 
if you were no further off, and in Yorkshire, we should think so. 
Farewell ! God prosper you and all that belongs to you ! 
Your sincere friend — for such I will call myself, though slow to 
use a word of such solemn meaning to any one." 

Two years later, in 1805, Scott was in Lakeland, and went to 
see Wordsworth at Dove Cottage. Authentic memories of this 
visit are scanty : Mrs. Scott was with her husband ; was there 
accommodation for the couple at the Town End cottage ? 
Tradition asserts that Scott himself was an inmate ; and that, 
finding his host's water-drinking manage a little chilly, he went 
for a daily morning-refresher to the inn at Grasmere. Quite 
certain it is that on an August day Wordsworth, Scott, and 
Humphry Davy climbed Helvellyn together. They passed, 
as they mounted, the place where the body of a man had been 
found that year, watched, three months after death, by his 
terrier dog. The man was well known as a fisherman and lover 
of the hills. Both poets commemorated the incident, Scott 
in long lines of fluent amphibrachs ; Wordsworth in one of his 
characteristic lyrical narratives called Fidelity. It was the dog's 
behaviour which moved the poets, working wholly without 
collusion. Wordsworth greatly admired the lines in which 
Scott addressed the faithful dumb watcher — 

" How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber ? 
When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start ? " 



S44 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Wordsworth himself — so he tells us — took the ** diction " of 
his last beautiful stanza from peasant lips — 

" Yes, proof was plain that, since the day 
When this ill-fated Traveller died, 
The Dog had watched about the spot, 

Or by his master's side : 
How nourished here through such long time 
He knows, who gave that love sublime j 
And gave that strength of feeling, great 
Above all human estimate I " 

Subsequent meetings, at the Lakes, in London, and at 
Coleorton, deepened the respect and affection between Words- 
worth and Scott. Yet Scott looked askance at a good deal in 
Wordsworth's poetry ; and Wordsworth allowed himself to 
wave aside the whole of Scott's in a very lofty manner. Scott's 
disapprobation was hinted with the infinite modesty and delicacy 
characteristic of the man. He pleaded for Wordsworth with 
Jeffrey, and " made him admire " this and that. But he had to 
admit that Wordsworth sometimes " got beyond him." Though 
he did not " know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of 
heart and loftiness of genius," he " differed from him in very many 
points of taste." "Why he will sometimes choose to crawl upon 
all-fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to 
lift to heaven, I am as little able to account for, as for his 
quarrelling . . . with the wrinkles which time and meditation 
have stamped his brow withal." So Scott wrote when he was 49, 
and Wordsworth 50. Seven years later, Scott put down more 
subtle criticism in his Journal. He remarked that something in his 
own character reminded him of Wordsworth's Matthew. Then 
he turns aside to rebuke Jeffrey gently for his inappreciation of 
Matthew. Jeffrey " loves to see imagination best when it is bitted 
and managed, and ridden upon the grand pas. He does not 
make allowance for starts and sallies and bounds, when Pegasus 
is beautiful to behold, though sometimes perilous to liis rider." 
This is exquisitely put ; and the Wordsworthian simplicity, over 
against Jeffrey's common sense, could find no better apology. 
But then Scott has a word for Wordsworth in his turn, mixed 
with a thoughtful self-estimate. " Not that I think the amiable 
bard of Rydal shows judgment in choosing such subjects as the 
popular mind cannot sympathize in. It is unwise and unjust to 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 245 

himself. I do not compare myself, in point of imagination, with 
Wordsworth— far from it ; for his is naturally exquisite, and 
highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I can see as many 
castles in the clouds as any man, as many genii in the curling 
smoke of a steam-engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the embers 
of a sea-coal fire. My life has been spent in such day-dreams. 
But I cry no roast meat. There are times when a man should 
remember what Rousseau used to say, Tais-toi, Jean Jacques, 
car on ne f entend pas ! " In other words, it was excess, rather 
than defect, of imagination which Scott blamed in Wordsworth ; 
and he blamed it more for the sake of the poet's popularity than 
for anything deeper. 

Very different was Wordsworth's tone about the poetry of 
Scott. He seemed unable to recognize in it any nobility of 
Romanticism ; or to hail it as a genuine agent in the restoration 
of the beautiful, as a renascence of wholesome wonder ; as the 
homely harvest of a seeing eye and a feeling heart. He fixed 
his attention on the narrative flow, and thought of it as mere 
rhymed story-telling ; he thought it superficial and external ; it 
had for him none of the depth essential to his conception of the 
higher poetry. He blamed the carelessness of the style. A 
deeper objection gives us pause. Scott, he said, was not true to 
Nature ; his descriptions were addressed to the ear, not to the 
mind. It is curious to contrast with this judgment that of 
Ruskin, who, when he wrote the third volume of Modern 
Painters, was no mean literary critic. In that volume Ruskin 
deliberately takes Scott, in his poetry, as the type of the truest 
modern feeling for landscape ; and if one merely glances at the 
quotations by which he illustrates and supports his thesis, it is 
difficult to disbelieve in its soundness. For the descriptions, 
the renderings of landscape which Scott gives us in his poetry, 
are without the frigidity and conventionality, the polysyllabic 
pomposity which do something to spoil his descriptions in 
prose ; in verse he attained to a rapidity which was not mere 
haste, but the unhesitating expression of full conviction ; to a 
simplicity and brevity which were born of perfect sincerity, and 
which enabled him to minister of the beautiful to all who were 
worthy to receive it. 

If this had been pointed out to Wordsworth, he could hardly 
have gainsaid it. But he would still have insisted that the 



246 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

beauty given by Scott was for the ear, not for the mind. He 
probably never paused, as Ruskin did, over Scott's Nature- 
poetry ; he read it or heard it, as part and parcel of a piece of 
mere story-telling ; and his general sense of externality, of mere 
picturesqueness and scene-painting, remained as his total impres- 
sion. In Wordsworth himself, Nature, in detail as in general, 
was too much the mere embodiment and vehicle of the Universe 
to be accepted as Scott — a true poet, but no philosopher — pre- 
sented her. For Wordsworth, the truth of Nature, which, in his 
estimation, Scott failed to reach and convey, was indeed that 
which never entered into the circle of Scott's mind — her mystical 
personality, her sublime unity. All else was mere surface-work, 
mere entertainment. It was a hasty and unjust judgment, and 
it did both Scott and Wordsworth harm. 

But Wordsworth, though he may have fallen short as Scott's 
reader, showed no shortcoming as his friend. In the radiance 
of that sweet personality, criticism was quickly lost in love; 
before the totality of that astonishing achievement, all men have 
to bow the knee. The fall of Scott, the collapse of his fortunes, 
the fatal breach in his health, the certainty of death on the mere 
confines of old age, gave deep pain to Wordsworth as it did to 
all who knew him, all to whom he was known. Early in 1830, 
when he was not yet 59, Scott had his first apoplectic stroke. 
Yet he went on bravely with his duties in the Court of Session, 
his Demonology and Witchcraft, and other literary labours. He 
would not look upon himself as fatally seized or threatened. 
In July he wrote to Wordsworth — whom he addressed " Dearest 
Wordsworth " — " Don't you remember something of a promise 
broken, and propose to repair it next year ? I hope you mean 
to visit Abbotsford, and bring with you as many of your family 
as you possibly can. You will find me in my glory ; . . . Mrs. 
Wordsworth and Miss Wordsworth will, I hope, think them- 
selves at home, as well as my early acquaintance. Miss 
Dorothea." Wordsworth replied to " dear Sir Walter," and 
rebuked him gently for writing " Mount Rydal " instead of 
" Rydal Mount." The visit came off in September, 1831, just a 
year before Scott's death. Scott had been declining fast. He 
had to retire from the clerkship of the Court of Session ; he 
had another stroke ; his faculties were manifestly impaired. 
More and more he leant on Will Laidlaw and his ever-ready 




SIR WALTKR SCOTT 

FUtIM U.MI-'INISHED I'OLITKAIT ISV Slk EUUl.N LANDbEER IN IHE NATIONAL fOKTKAIT (JALLEKY 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 247 

kindness ; patiently he worked at Count Robert of Paris, Castle 
Datigerotis, 3.nd Tales of a Grandfather. In the summer, Turner 
the painter was with him. It was resolved to try the effect of a 
voyage and winter abroad. Scott was to start on September 23, 
and on the 21st Wordsworth and Dora arrived at Abbots- 
ford. Wordsworth would have gone earlier, but had been 
prevented from starting by a bad attack of inflammation of the 
eyQS. However, Scott's preparations were made, and there was 
a pleasant little party at Abbotsford, with an air of leisurely 
hospitality. Though Lockhart reports that his wife had gone on 
to London the day before the Wordsworths came, Wordsworth 
himself speaks of her as at Abbotsford, and as "chanting old 
ballads to her harp." Major Scott was there, and his sister 
Anne ; and there were other agreeable and amusing people. 
Wordsworth was shocked by the change in his old friend ; but 
Scott did his best as the poet-host of a poet. An expedition 
was made to Newark Castle — Wordsworth's second visit to the 
Vale of Yarrow. Sir Walter was able to walk with something of 
the old vigour. Wordsworth commemorated the day in his 
Yarrow Revisited — verses which have none of the charm of the 
other poems inspired by the haunted stream. Yet there is fine 
homage to Scott in the assurance of welcome by Italy to the 
Minstrel of the Border — 

" For Thou, upon a hundred streams, 

By tales of love and sorrow, 
Of faithful love, undaunted truth, 

Hast shed the power of Yarrow ; 
And streams, unknown, hills yet unseen, 

Wherever they invite Thee, 
At parent Nature's grateful call. 

With gladness must requite Thee." 

As they returned to Abbotsford by the ford of the Tweed, 
Wordsworth saw a sad light, purple rather than golden, on the 
Eildon Hills. It seemed " fraught with omen " ; and he put all 
the sadness of his heart into an irregular sonnet — 

" A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain, 
Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light 
Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height : 
Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain 
For kindred Power departing from their sight ; 



248 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a bUthe strain, 

Saddens his voice again, and yet again. 

Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners ! for the might 

Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes ; 

Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue 

Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows 

Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true, 

Ye winds of ocean and the midland sea, 

Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope ! " 

In Dora's album, on the morning before the Wordsworths 
left, Scott wrote verses, too imperfect to be transcribed here. 
Speaking of them to Dora, Scott said : " I should not have done 
anything of this kind but 'for your father's sake ; they are 
probably the last verses I shall ever write." Then the poets 
had a long talk, in the course of which Scott spoke of the 
happiness, on the whole, of his life. To Wordsworth, wishing 
him health from his journey, Scott, with a sad smile, quoted 
from Yarrow Unvisited — 

" When I am there, although 'tis fair, 
'Twill be another Yarrow." 

Then they parted ; and next day Scott began his journey 
to Naples. 

In 1837, Wordsworth in Italy sums up his feeling about 
Scott, in the long blank verse poem called Mtismgs near Aqua- 
pendente. The sight of the Apennines characteristically sent 
his fancy wandering to his Lakeland, to Fairfield, and Seat 
Sandal and Helvellyn. And then his thoughts fell on Scott, 
and he remembered how Italy, with all her amplitude of beauty, 
had no cure for his sick body and mind. And he was moved to 
thanksgiving that he was still well enough, still free enough, 
to enjoy what had done nothing for his friend — 

" That I — so near the term of human life 
Appointed by man's common heritage. 
Frail as the frailest one, withal (if that 
Deserve a thought) but little known to fame — 
Am free to rove where Nature's loveliest looks. 
Art's noblest relics, history's rich bequests. 
Failed to reanimate and but feebly cheered 
The whole world's Darling — free to rove at will 
O'er high and low, and if requiring rest, 
Rest from enjoyment only." 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 249 

In the Extempore Effusion of 1835 Wordsworth had re- 
membered Scott. He thought of his visits to Yarrow — 

" When last along its banks I wandered, 

Through groves that had begun to shed 

Their golden leaves upon the pathways, 

My steps the Border-Minstrel led. 
" The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, 

'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies." 

But the immediate inspiration of the poem was a less 
famous Scot than Sir Walter — less famous and yet as genuine 
— ^James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, the author of Kilmeny 
and The Qtieett's Wake; oneoftheexpoundersofthe Romanticism 
of the Scottish border, whom British literature cannot quite 
afford to forget. Wordsworth met him during his first Scottish 
expedition in 1803, not long after Scott himself had come to 
know him. Hogg was a sheep-farmer rather than a shepherd 
proper ; a rough, uncouth fellow, with a streak of most real 
genius. In Wordsworth's cold, uncompromising phrase, " he 
was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners, 
and low and offensive opinions." It was in Hogg's company 
that Wordsworth first saw Yarrow. 

" When first, descending from the moorland, 
I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide 
Along a bare and open valley, 
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide." 

Wordsworth had not enough humour, flexibility, breadth to 
touch things and persons Scottish with more than his finger- 
tips. But with one of the most vigorous and impressive of the 
Scots of genius in those days, he was brought into close relations 
of more than one kind. John Wilson, the " Christopher North " 
of Blackwood's Magazine, is one of those who suffer the nemesis of 
too strong personality. A poet, a critic, an essayist, a humourist, 
a journalist, a professor of moral philosophy, he was interesting 
and creditable in each capacity, and yet he is hardly remembered 
in any. He is remembered chiefly by those survivors who can 
look back on the living man, with his splendid face and figure, in 
the Edinburgh streets, his masses of tawny hair, and the desultory 
rhapsodies in the college class-room, which did duty as lectures 
on moral philosophy. Yet he was a grand combination of brain 



250 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

and muscle ; a lover of the open air, of sport, of pedestrianism, 
" and yet a spirit still, and bright " with the love of all humane 
and generous and inspiring things that are born of men's minds. 
The son of a Paisley manufacturer, John Wilson was born in 
1785, the year also of De Quincey's birth. Unlike most Scots 
of his rank in those days, Wilson went from Glasgow College 
to the University of Oxford, becoming a Commoner of Magdalen, 
in 1803. Before he left Glasgow there happened to him what 
happened to De Quincey almost simultaneously — he felt the 
impact of the early genius of Wordsworth. He read Lyrical 
Ballads ; and so moved by them was he that in May, 1802, in 
his seventeenth year, he wrote a long letter about them to Words- 
worth — a letter expressing the kind of passionate interest and 
admiration which De Quincey felt ; a letter such as it does a 
youth good to write, and such as the greatest man may feel 
proud to get from the humblest of his disciples. " To receive 
a letter from you," Wilson wrote, "would afford me more 
happiness than any occurrence in this world, save the happiness 
of my friends." He felt that humanity in Wordsworth spoke 
straight to the humanity in himself. "You have seized upon 
those feelings that most deeply interest the heart." He realized 
the novelty, the orginality, of Wordsworth's treatment of Nature, 
The "disposition of the mind to assimilate the appearances of 
external nature to its own situation . . . you have employed 
with a most electrifying effect." With the ethical assurance of 
a well-disposed youth, Wilson dwelt on the " morality " of the new 
poetry ; and informed Wordsworth that Lyrical Ballads was the 
book which he valued next to his Bible. Nor was the boy 
afraid of blaming, any more than of praising, his hero to his 
face. He considered that Wordsworth had fallen into an error, 
the effects of which were, however, " exceedingly trivial." In 
his desire to be truthful he had at times forgotten the paramount 
obligation on poetry to give " pleasure," i.e. to be always 
beautiful, or, at least, interesting. In The Idiot Boy, for example, 
Wilson thought that Wordsworth had failed to make Betty's 
maternal feeling interesting as such ; and that, he considered, 
was the reason why he " never met one who did not rise rather 
displeased from the perusal " of the poem. 

Wordsworth's reply was lengthy, and must have intoxicated 
Wilson. He discussed the influence of scenery on character, 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 251 

and defended himself as to the unfortunate Idiot Boy, in words 
If which are an instalment of his theory of poetry. Granting 
, Wilson's contention that poetry must please, he asks : must 
[j please whom? And he answers: not this taste or that taste, 
|<but essential human nature. And then he asks : "Where are 
!we to find the best measure of this ? I answer, from within ; 
. by stripping our own hearts naked, and by looking out of 
: ourselves to those men who lead the simplest lives, and most 
; according to Nature; men who have never known false 
!: refinements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms, 
J effeminate habits of thinking and feeling ; or who, having 
•known these things, have outgrown them." " People in our 
rank in life," Wordsworth proceeds, "are perpetually falling 
into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that Human 
Nature and the persons they associate with are one and the 
same thing." The fallacy imparts itself to literature ; and a 
kind of conventionally polite standard is set up, below which 
poetic themes must not fall. This standard it was the mission 
of Lyrical Ballads to overthrow with the battle-cry of nothing 
common ! Idiot is an ugly word ; but the kind of human being 
designated by the word is one of God's creatures, and he and the 
ministries of service which surround him are for poetry as much 
as any other displays of human nature and human affection. " I 
have often applied to idiots," Wordsworth wrote, " in my own 
mind, that sublime expression of Scripture, that their life is hidden 
with God. ... I have often looked upon the conduct of fathers 
and mothers of the lower classes of society toward idiots as a 
great triumph of the human heart. It is there that we see the 
strength, disinterestedness, and grandeur of love ; nor have I 
ever been able to contemplate an object that calls out so many 
excellent and virtuous sentiments without finding it hallowed 
thereby, and having something in me which bears down before 
it, like a deluge, every feeble sensation of disgust and aversion." 
Wordsworth concluded his argument with a significant state- 
ment. " It is not enough for me as a Poet, to delineate merely 
such feelings as all men do sympathize with ; but it is also 
highly desirable to add to these others, such as all men may 
sympathize with, and such as there is reason to believe they 
would be better and more moral beings if they did sympathize." 
We know not how Wilson replied to this letter: perhaps 



252 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

he only hugged it to his heart. He might have replied that 
Wordsworth had hardly met his chief difficulty, namely, that 
the affection of Betty Foy was not, in the poef s presentation of it^ 
interesting enough for poetry. It may be allowed to the 
spectator of this argumentative encounter to remark that 
neither of the disputants quite understood the real claim of 
TJie Idiot Boy to poetic rank — its possession of humour. With 
its delicate union of humour and tenderness, and its delightful 
background of moonlit landscape, it was and is a true poem, 
worth pages of the sentimental melody which Wilson was after- 
wards to pour forth. Neither Wordsworth nor Wilson could 
understand this ; and so their doughty strokes did little more 
than beat the air. 

In 1807, when he was twenty-two, and had just finished a 
brilliant Oxford career, Wilson straightway made himself a 
Laker, by taking a cottage on the woody slopes that bound 
Windermere on the east. Henceforth he was "Mr. Wilson of 
EUeray," enjoying, like De Quincey, the proximity of the poets 
of Grasmere and Keswick, and bent on spending ample means 
in a life of poetry and sport and congenial fellowship. He set 
about building a larger house, and making acquaintance in all 
directions. He now got to know Wordsworth for the first 
time. In the winter of 1808-9, ^^e winter of The Friend and 
the Convention of Cintra pamphlet, the smoky winter at Allan 
Bank, Wilson first saw De Quincey, his contemporary at 
Oxford, his one companion in true Wordsworthian insight. 
De Quincey and Coleridge were both at Allan Bank. " One 
room on the ground-floor" — so De Quincey wrote — "designed 
for a breakfasting-room . . . was then occupied by Mr. Cole- 
ridge as a study. On this particular day, the sun having only 
just set, it naturally happened that Mr, Coleridge — whose 
nightly vigils were long — had not yet come down to breakfast ; 
meantime, and until the epoch of the Coleridgian breakfast 
should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to profaner 
uses. Here, therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastily in 
quest of a book, I found seated, and in earnest conversation, 
two gentlemen ; one of them my host, Mr. Wordsworth, at 
that time about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old; the 
other was a younger man by good sixteen or seventeen years, 
in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health, fervidus juventa, 




PROFESSOR JOHN WILSON. 

("CHRISTOPHER NORTH") 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 253 

and wearing upon his countenance a powerful expression of 
ardour and animated intelligence, mixed with much good 
nature. * Mr. Wilson of Elleray^ — delivered as the formula of 
introduction, in the deep tones of Mr. Wordsworth — at once 
banished the momentary surprise I felt on finding an unknown 
stranger where I had expected nobody, and substituted a sur- 
prise of another kind. I now well understood who it was that 
I saw." And De Quincey goes on describing the brilliant 
young man in his careful copious way. " A tall man about six 
feet high . . . built with tolerable appearance of strength . . . 
but wearing, for the predominant character of his person, light- 
ness and agility ; — he seemed framed with an express view to 
gymnastical exercises of every sort." De Quincey could not 
call him handsome. His complexion was too florid ; hair of a 
hue quite unsuited to that complexion ; eyes not good, " having 
no apparent depth, but seeming mere surfaces " ; nothing fine, 
in short, except a Ciceronian mouth and chin. Wilson's manner 
and talk were more arresting than his appearance ; the things 
which chiefly struck De Quincey were "the humility and 
gravity with which he spoke of himself ; his large expansion of 
heart, and a certain air of noble frankness which overspread 
everything he said ; he seemed to have an intense enjoyment of 
life ; indeed, being young, rich, healthy, and full of intellectual 
activity, it could not be very wonderful that he should feel 
happy and pleased with himself and others ; but it was some- 
what unusual to find that so rare an assemblage of endowments 
had communicated no tinge of arrogance to his manner, or at 
all disturbed the general temperance of his mind." 

The presence of such a man in those solitudes, and the 
sumptuous, sociable life which he lived in the neighbourhood, 
did something to enrich Wordsworth's experience. Words- 
worth and Wilson made a more satisfactory pair of friends than 
Wordsworth and De Quincey. Like De Quincey, Wilson loved 
to ramble about by night ; but his days were filled with more 
genial companionships than the solitude-loving opium-eater 
could or would command. Wilson made poetry in his nocturnal 
walks ; he cultivated Wordsworthian moods and even Words- 
worthian expressions, here and there in a much more full- 
blooded style than Wordsworth's — 



254 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" Beneath the fuU-orb'd moon, that bathed in light 
The mellow'd verdure of Helvellyn's steep, 
My spirit teeming with creations bright, 
I walked like one who wanders in his sleep ! 



Through the hush'd air awoke mysterious awe ; 

God cheer'd my loneliness with holy mirth; 
And in this blended mood I clearly saw 

The moving spirit that pervades the earth.'''' 

Wilson gave Wordsworth a very complete sympathy. In a 
fragment of prose-poetry, he commemorates, tenderly and 
lovingly, the parting of Wordsworth and his sailor-brother, 
which had made a great impression on his mind. "I one 
sweet summer day went along with him and heard the melan- 
choly tale. Then, whoever gave to that sublime solitude muse 
with holy feelings, and with the wildness of nature join human 
sympathies." 

The first phase of Wilson's Windermere life, with its enthu- 
siasms of action and feeling, did not last very long. Wilson 
found a wife at Ambleside, and condensed his poetic efforts in 
one long, fluent, picturesque poem. The Isle of Palms. Its 
fluency and picturesqueness, rather than inwardness and imagi- 
nation, justified Scott in speaking of it as "something in the 
style of Southey." Scott welcomed Wilson as an author, and 
characterized him well as an "excellent, warm-hearted, and 
enthusiastic young man ; something too much, perhaps, of the 
latter quantity, places him amongst the list of originals." The 
Isle of Palms appeared in 1812, and was well received. Another 
volume, containing a drama. The City of the Plague, and other 
poems, came out in 18 16; but before its publication, the pros- 
perity of the EUeray life was wrecked, and Wilson entered on 
a new phase of activity. His independent income was lost ; 
he had to work for his bread ; and he went to Edinburgh to 
prepare for the Scottish Bar, and to enter, in a year or two, on 
his famous connection with Blackwood, and his best-known work 
as a writer of prose. He did not give up Elleray, though 
henceforward it was a haunt of his leisure, rather than a per- 
manent home. 

1 8 17 was an important year in British literary annals. The 
critical renascence and the exciting conditions of public afi"airs 
had given birth to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, of 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 255 

which the former was Whig and the latter chiefly Tory. Litera- 
ture, as such, has nothing to do with party-politics; but in 
those days partisanship was allowed to take possession of 
literature and falsify its criticism. Nowhere was partisanship 
keener, nowhere was intelligence more vigorous, than in Edin- 
burgh. The city teemed with able young men ; and WiUiam 
Blackwood the bookseller was as able and astute as any of 
them. The Whig Edinburgh, with Jeffrey as its oracle, had an 
unreasonable and undesirable monopoly: John Murray's 
Quarterly was a London affak. There was room, nay, there 
was a crying need, for a monthly Edinburgh magazine, of Tory 
principles and with a mellower tone than Jeffrey and his co- 
adjutors could command. In October, 1817, after one false 
start under another name, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 
began to appear ; and Wilson found in it his chief outlet hence- 
forward. Yet it was some time before he could accommodate 
himself to it, or, indeed, before it learned its own proper role in 
the world of letters. In its first inception, Blackwood was very 
republican in constitution, Blackwood himself being its sole 
editor ; and it was written in too partisan, personal, and satirical 
a view to be suited either to Wilson's gracious and generous 
temper, or to the healing and edifying work it was destined to 
do in the 'twenties and 'thirties. The Blackwood which tried 
to scorch Coleridge and put an extinguisher on Keats was not 
the Blackwood of " Christopher North." Blackwood was going 
to be something very different from the mere organ of Scottish 
Toryism, something much better than an opponent of the 
Edinburgh, a rival of the Quarterly. Its real mission, not in 
Scotland only, but in Britain, was to be the medium of that 
higher lighter literature — the literature of fiction, of sympathetic 
criticism, of humour, of feeling for landscape and pastoral life — 
which was born afresh at the opening of the nineteenth century. 
The Blackwood which was all this was the Blackwood which 
gave itself up to " Christopher North." He, laying poetry aside, 
became its brain, its life, its soul. In 1820 Wilson was made 
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, 
and Professor he remained for more than thirty years. But he 
found time simultaneously to pour himself out in Blackwood, to 
be its best critic, its most unflagging humourist, its most delight- 
ful essayist. Of Wilson's humour the dialogues — not all written 



256 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

by Christopher — called Nodes Ambrosiancs are the most sub- 
stantial monument. If the Noctes repel by an occasional 
coarseness, or by a too continuous gush of the rhetorical 
sentimentalism which was Wilson's bane, they are an invaluable 
record of an interesting phase of Scottish character and letters ; 
they show us, better than anything else, not only the better and 
more intellectual side of Scottish convivialism in the reign of 
George IV., but that Scoto-English literary rapprochement, 
which was shown also by the popularity of Scott on both sides 
of the Border ; by De Quincey's complete domestication in 
Edinburgh ; by the Oxford associations of John Gibson Lock- 
hart ; and, last but not least, by Wilson's own double personality 
as at once a Laker and a Scot of Scots. No literary shortcomings 
can ever rob the Noctes of this high value. 

And then the Recreations of Christopher North I Ch'istopher 
at the Lakes, Christopher at Colonsay, A nglimania ; what delight- 
ful desultoriness ; what lyrical egoism ; what wholesome Nature- 
worship, wholesome sociability ! For the periodical essay of 
this kind, John Wilson, on his much lower plane, really did 
nearly as much as Charles Lamb. 

How Christopher North handled Wordsworth in Blackwood 
— and he had much to do with him — we shall see in the last 
chapter. Personal intercourse there was not much between the 
two men after the change in Wilson's fortunes in 1815. Wilson's 
visits to EUeray were infrequent and brief, and generally in 
summer, when the Professor was the centre of a gay party, not 
quite suited to Wordsworth's idiosyncrasy. 

In the summer of 1825 there were specially great doings. 
Sir Walter Scott, with his daughter Anne and Lockhart, was 
in Ireland that summer ; and, on their way back, they passed 
northward by Wales and the Lakes. Of course they found 
their way to Elleray, and stayed three days with the Wilsons. 
Nor was this all. At Storrs, further down the lake, lived a 
certain Colonel Bolton, with whom George Canning was staying. 
Canning and Scott were great friends ; and Wordsworth and 
Southey greatly admired the Tory statesman, with his love of 
national independence abroad, and his unflinching resistance to 
Parliamentary reform at home. Therefore there were great 
comings and goings between Storrs, Elleray, Rydal, and Greta 
Hall ; and the eastern shore of Windermere was brilliant in 



WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 257 

August, 1825. Canning was greatly appreciative of Wilson, 
whom he called " Lord High Admiral of the Lakes." Wilson's 
favourite form of social celebration was the organizing a regatta 
on the lake ; and he outdid himself on this occasion. The house- 
parties at Storrs and Elleray met day after day ; Wordsworth 
and Southey were as merry as everybody else ; there were 
riding-parties in the woods in the mornings ; boatings on the 
moonlit lake in the evenings ; and then the climax — the un- 
paralleled regatta. " Perhaps," Lockhart narrated, " there were 
not fewer than fifty barges following in the Professor's radiant 
procession when it paused at the Point of Storrs to admit into 
the place of honour the vessel that carried kind and happy 
Mr. Bolton and his guest. The three Bards of the Lakes led 
the cheers that hailed Scott and Canning ; and the music and 
sunshine, flags, streamers, and gay dresses, the merry hum of 
voices, and the rapid splashing of innumerable oars, made up a 
dazzling mixture of sensations, as the flotilla wound its way 
among richly-foliaged islands, and along bays and promontories 
peopled with enthusiastic spectators." 

But, though Elleray and Wordsworth occasionally saw 
Wilson, he was now and henceforward essentially the Edin- 
burgh man, the mainstay of Blackwood, the beloved paterfamilias 
and Professor. Between them, his daughter and his pupils have 
left a delightful picture of the splendid giant when his yellow 
hair was growing grey; of his loving heart, his overflowing 
energy, his bewildered and bewildering absence of mind. We 
see him in his class-room with his copious rhetorical lectures 
written on backs of old letters or any other handy scraps of 
paper ; his blue eyes flashing with elevated feeling ; or his 
powerful frame shaken with emotion under some spasm of 
pathetic reminiscence or tragic contrast. We see him in his 
home, tender with his wife, playful with his children and grand- 
children ; the friend of every gentle and oppressed dumb 
creature. He outlived Wordsworth four years ; working on 
manfully until the arresting touch of paralysis was laid upon 
him. When he passed away, in the spring of 1854, a large and 
light-bearing spirit was lost to the world. 



CHAPTER XII 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 

THE question as to Wordsworth's affinities with contempo- 
rary poets who have become immortal, is not to be 
solved by collecting his opinions of them, or theirs of him. 
Wordsworth's own criticism was never enthusiastic, and often, 
when he was dealing with individuals, it was ill-informed, preju- 
diced, and conventional. Moreover, great as was his achieve- 
ment in poetic reform, splendidly as he showed how imagination 
at its highest deals with poetic material, he was often imper- 
fectly aware of the whereabouts of his own successes ; and his 
theory of imagination, which he was eager to put in logical form, 
is, when one tries to grasp it, a mere vanishing cloud. There 
was a strong tendency, even among those who were hardly 
" Lakists," to accept the Lakist theory and to cut Wordsworth, 
or Wordsworth and Coleridge, off from the poetic movement of 
their age. (Compare C. Lamb's attitude to Byron, and the all 
but ignoring of Shelley and Keats.) 

The other side of the account, no doubt, is more satisfactory. 
What Wordsworth said or wrote of the poetry of Coleridge, or 
Scott, or Keats, or Shelley, or Byron, might be blotted out with 
hardly a grain of appreciable loss. On the other hand, if we 
forget Byron's vulgar scorn, there is sufficient evidence that the 
poets we have named, although not Wordsworth's partisans, 
gave him the kind of consideration and veneration, the kind of 
admiring homage which the world now gives him without 
dissent. Yet, even so, their criticism was contemporary ; and its 
historical interest is not equalled by its absolute value. Their 
consciousness, however, that Wordsworth, with whatever dif- 
ferences, was in poetry a fellow-worker, makes a better starting- 
point than Wordsworth's own self-consciousness, or the parti- 
sanship which flattered it. We can see what Wordsworth 

258 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 259 

himself failed to see, that the other great poets of the Romantic 
Revival were in Wordsworth's circle : we only want to assure 
ourselves as to their claims and qualifications to stand there. 

The Romantic Revival as a whole may be treated from 
many points of view. Perhaps one of the most practically use- 
ful approaches to it is made by considering its relation to 
Elizabethanism on the one hand, and to the dominant genius of 
the eighteenth century on the other. For, if we exclude 
Chaucer, as being outside our immediate question, and if we 
make the Elizabethan age and the eighteenth century large 
enough to include all the epoch-making English poetry between 
the Shepheardis Calendar and Lyrical Ballads, we shall 
prepare ourselves to realize what was done, and done in concert, 
for English poetry between 1798 and 1825. The change from 
where poetry stood under Dryden and Pope to where it stood 
under, say, Wordsworth and Shelley, is so startling that it 
cannot be ignored, and cannot easily be misunderstood. Had 
Dryden been what Chaucer has been called, the " father of 
English poetry," one might say with some plausibility that such 
poetry as he founded was hardly poetry at all, and that it was 
left for the poets of the Romantic Revival to distinguish the 
true from the nominal, the real from the official. With the 
poetry of Dryden and Pope, even with the poetry of Gray, the 
poetry of the first quarter of the nineteenth century has the 
slenderest affinities. Milton stands in a class by himself. 
Touching Dryden on the one hand, and easily reaching back 
into the Elizabethan age on the other, he has but slender 
relationship to either. Essentially, what the Elizabethans did 
for English poetry was to make it human, and to make it the 
vehicle of beauty. And they did it by inventing and perfecting 
the drama on the one hand, and the lyrical strain on the other. 
Spenser's great allegory is, like Paradise Lost, to some extent 
solitary : it is a poem of many aspects, partly didactic, partly 
Protestant, partly courtly, partly conventional-chivalric. It is 
the constant beauty and unfailingly sweet phraseology of the 
Faerie Queene which secure its immortality. Much more 
typical is the Epithalamitmi, with its whole-hearted exposition 
of love, its gorgeous imagery, its incomparable lyrical rapture. 
Here, and in Shakespeare, we have the best that Elizabeth's 
age could do for poetry. 



260 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

It was much indeed ; and yet it left much to be done, much 
towards which the eighteenth century accomplished nothing. 
Poetry was not yet " meditative " ; it was not yet introspective ; 
it was hardly yet ideal or universal. The glory of Elizabethan- 
ism was its actuality, its satisfaction with its own surroundings, 
its own successful, strong-pulsed life. England, the Queen, 
Protestantism, El Dorado — these were universals and ideals 
enough ; and if at any point they failed, there was the past to 
supplement them, the past of Greece, the past of Rome. With 
such a world to be realized, to be held, by such intelligence, 
there was no room for philosophy, no temptation to sentimen- 
talism : here was no place for bitter indignation ; for eager 
longing, for scornful satire ; no call to be over-stimulated by 
cosmopolitan ideals, or to reconstruct ultimate conceptions of 
God and man. Action and passion, the glory of the established 
order, so new and yet so strong ; the romance of discovery, 
added to the immortal romance of love ; were these things not 
the stuff of centuries of poetry } 

But things move quickly ; and the Elizabethan freshness 
died away. Puritanism came, suggesting a new synthesis of 
things ; poetry, in spite of Milton, was forced into opposition ; 
it became the minister of intelligence rather than of feeling, of 
criticism rather than of enjoyment ; it lost its hold on beauty. 
Too much was sacrificed to form ; too little play was allowed to 
individuality. Then, at last, individuality turned scornfully 
round on tradition. The world seemed cumbered with outworn 
tyrannies ; and, except where there was revolution, the imagina- 
tion took refuge in ideals, ideals of the past, ideals of the future. 
The sense of the beautiful reawoke, and insisted on expressing 
itself anew. Nature, which the Elizabethan had cared for after 
his fashion as a haunt of fairies or a background for human life, 
came to be loved for its own sake and for its infinite spiritual 
significance, as well as its infinite beauty and charm. Foreign 
landscape began to make appeal to the most insular of English 
patriots. Individual feeling, even the " pageant of bleeding 
hearts," was precious now as poetry. The relations of God and 
the world called out for poetic restatement. 

In all these things we recognize the work of the Romantic 
Revival as a whole. How is the responsibility for it to be 
distributed ? 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 261 

Take the two most apparently antithetic of all the great 
poets of the age — Wordsworth and Byron. Nothing would have 
surprised and shocked Wordsworth more than to have been 
regarded as in any sense a co-operator with Byron. " Power," 
power prostituted for the most part to the basest uses, was all 
that that pure and stern mind would have allowed to the poet of 
Childe Harold and Don Juan. And we know that Byron, in 
his estimate of Wordsworth, never got much beyond contempt 
superinduced upon conventionalism. Yet how does the matter 
stand ? Byron had Popian sympathies and did Popian work ; 
yet Byron was as much an innovator on the poetic tradition as 
Wordsworth. His satire may be his best work ; but Childe 
Harold lives and will live ; the charm of the oriental tales will 
never wholly disappear ; and Byron, after his fashion, was a 
lyrist, and not a wholly insincere one. His ways, indeed, lay 
far apart from Wordsworth's ; yet, in one respect at least, he 
did Wordsworth's work. If Mrs. Radcliffe can be credited, as 
assuredly she can, with having rediscovered the beauty of 
Nature, so still more can Byron. If Wordsworth sang the 
praise of mountains and lakes in England, so, and with an equal 
enthusiasm, did Byron of mountains and lakes in Switzerland 
and Greece. Byron's sunset at Venice is as carefully observed, 
and treated with as much sense of the beautiful, as Wordsworth's 
green linnet or daisy. Moreover, no English poet before Byron 
would or could have written such a passage. It is as much a 
" romantic revival " as The A ncient Mariner ; nay, it is not a 
revival, it is an origination. 

Because Byron was a sentimentalist, a rhetorician, an egotist 
it is the shallowest criticism to deny him true and wonderful 
poetic inspiration. And though he was much of a poseur, a good 
deal of his poetry represented as genuine a return to Nature as 
Wordsworth's. His appropriation of European landscape for 
poetry, his invention of a poetry of travel, was an achievement 
closely akin to Wordsworth's invention of a new pastoralism. 
Both achievements were wholly free from imitativeness ; in both 
there was a return to \}ciq facts of Nature from the ideal landscape 
of Spenser and Milton ; both record impressions absolutely at 
first hand. Wordsworth maintained that Byron, when his poetry 
was nearest being good, plagiarized from him ; and it is much 
the fashion to find Wordsworthian influence in the third and 



262 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

fourth cantos of Childe Harold. We may decline to take up the 
question of the plagiarism. As for influence, it is evident that 
the purest originality has parentage and ancestry ; and that 
influence does not necessarily turn first-hand into second-hand 
work. 

Another point of kinship between the two dissimilar poets is 
their common passion for liberty. Here there is essential unity 
with superficial diversity. Byron was nearly a generation 
younger than Wordsworth ; and while the elderly senior poet 
was reposing in the Conservative atmosphere of Lord Liverpool's 
riginie, the young Byron was plunging and kicking in the 
somewhat aimless energies of the new Radicalism. But these 
things do not count. In the politics of their poetry both men 
were pledged — so to put it — to tyrannicide, to the cause of 
nations against their oppressors. As Wordsworth's heart leaped 
for Switzerland and Venice and Spain, so did Byron's for 
Greece. And, long before the age at which Wordsworth became 
a timid Conservative, Byron, in a fantasy of self-devotion, had 
given his life for the kind of liberty which Wordsworth had most 
at heart. 

Once more, if Byron is sometimes wearisome with his guide- 
book-like snippets of reminiscence, his sequences of appropriate 
poetical reflection, is not Wordsworth sometimes the same? 
What about Ecclesiastical Sonnets ; what about those super- 
abundant "Memorials" of tours in Scotland, tours on the 
Continent ? To pause, with one's " foot upon a nation's dust," 
to "start a ghost at every corner," is of the essence of 
Romanticism. 

Wordsworth and Byron, then, were not wholly antithetic ; 
still less so were Wordsworth and Shelley. Wordsworth, for his 
part, mostly ignored Shelley, though he knew something of his 
poetry, and thought him a great artist, a master of style. Shelley 
thought of Wordsworth much as " the lost leader ; " but he 
thought of him, at least early in his life, as an excellent poet. To 
Wordsworth, Shelley, like Byron, was a moral suspect, a teacher 
of dangerous doctrines, made all the more seductively dangerous 
by the fineness of the art by which they were conveyed. In 
Wordsworth's nature there were recurrent strata of common- 
place ; and these were often tapped in the course of his critical 
operations, especially upon contemporaries. One of the most 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 263 

characteristic of these strata was the conviction that poetry 
ought to be, and is, didactic in the sense in which teaching and 
preaching are ; and the allied conviction, that a man's poetry is 
the mere transcript of his opinions. It is perhaps impossible to 
conceive Wordsworth reading through Prometheus Unbound 
with the care which he demanded from readers of The Excursion ; 
but it is certain that, if he had done so, he would have regarded 
it as spreading atheism and rebellion clad in rainbows. If he 
had read The Cenci, he (who was capable of calling Coleridge's 
Love sensual and Chrisfabel indelicate) would have said, " See 
what comes of loose notions about marriage ! " As regarded his 
ov/n poetry, Wordsworth of course transcended this view of 
things. There would have been a pretty to-do if anybody had 
called the Tintern Abbey lines pantheistic, or had tried to connect 
them with their author's infrequent church-going in those days. 
Wordsworth would have replied, and replied quite properly, that, 
however necessary dogma may be in religion, it is not required 
at all in poetry ; and that, if a poet uses quasi-YQllgions phraseo- 
logy, he does so with at least a philosopher's or scientist's licence. 
And as to the church-going, he would have said to the critic qtid 
critic, " What business is that of yours ? " 

The question as to the didactic motive and practical moral 
effect of any given poetry, and the question whether any sup- 
posed taint of life or opinion in a poet communicates itself to 
his writings, are among the most delicate problems in literary 
criticism. If Wordsworth failed to see that the problem is 
solved very differently in the cases of Byron and Shelley, we 
need not be very hard on him. Nor does it matter if he failed 
to recognize the essential kinship between his own work and 
Shelley's. For us who read both poets with inward as well as 
outward eyes, the kinship is plain enough. 

The poets had very similar experiences in the education of 
feeling, that education which gives a permanent direction to 
poetic effort. Shelley has not left so much express auto- 
biography as Wordsworth ; but he has left enough, direct and 
indirect, to show how he was led to his view of the poetry of 
things. If we do not learn as much from Alastor diWd the Hymn 
to Intellectual Beauty as from The Prelude and the Tintern Abbey 
lines, we learn enough to convince us that both poets felt much 
the same need, and supplied it in much the same way. Alastor, 



264 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

for all its beauty and characteristic charm, is a dreary and morbid 
poem, and Wordsworth would doubtless have dismissed it as 
such, horrified at the suggestion that it had any affinity with 
himself. The hero of Alastor is not even Shelley as he was ; he 
is Shelley as he might have been, as he was just saved from 
being. Yet Alastor is, mtitatis mutandis, essentially what 
Wordsworth was at that stage in the "growth of a poet's 
mind " before " love of Nature " had begun to " lead to love of 
man " ; before the " still, sad music of humanity " had entered 
to harmonize with the tones of early rapture. It is very likely 
that Shelley, who was much under Wordsworth's influence in 
those days, borrowed from Wordsworth the phrase " natural 
piety," which occurs in the third line of Alastor ; and, at any 
rate, Shelley's hero, at the outset, is a recognizably Words- 
worthian figure. Wordsworth, indeed, was never morbid : he 
never, so far as we know, made his bed "in charnels and on 
coffins," in the hope of inducing some communicative ghost 
to make known to him the secret of things. But, on the whole, 
the analysis of Alastor's early " natural piety " might be that of 
Wordsworth's — 

" If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood. 
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs ; 



If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
I consciously have injured, but still loved 
And cherished these my kindred." 

Alastor is a purely abstract figure ; the mere shadow of a 
shade. The feverish thirst of his egoism drives him into experi- 
ences of which there is no counterpart in Wordsworth's biography 
or imagination. But, like Paracelsus, like Aprile, or, for that 
matter, like Faust, Alastor is the victim of a false view of the 
universe, a wilful taking of the part for the whole, the wilful 
rejection of the divine obligations of fellowship. His ideal is 
never realized, because he will have nothing to do with its 
appointed realization in the ministries of social life. And the 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 265 

knowledge of this was a critical lesson of Wordsworth's educa- 
tion as a poet. Shelley might have taken as the motto of his 
poem Wordsworth's verses on Peel Castle — 

" Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, 
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind ! 
Such happiness, wherever it be known, 
Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 

" But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, 
And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here, — 
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn." 

In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Shelley speaks of himself 
without mystification or disguise. But he first speaks of Beauty 
in the most universal conception of it, and on its intellectual 
rather than its sensuous side, in language which inevitably 
reminds us of Wordsworth, For what is Wordsworth's most 
general and abstract conception of Beauty ? 

" Beauty — a living Presence of the earth, 
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms 
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed 
From earth's materials — waits upon my steps ; 
Pitches her tents before me as I move, 
An hourly neighbour; Paradise, and groves 
Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 
Sought in the Atlantic Main — why should they be 
A history only of departed things, 
Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
For the discerning intellect of Man, 
When wedded to this goodly universe 
In love and holy passion, shall find these 
A simple produce of the common day." 

In Shelley's Hymn Wordsworth's " cheerful faith " is 
wanting. Beauty is a compensation for the blank and chill 
negation of things ; it is not their efflorescence and fruition. 
And even Beauty, without which we could not live, has the 
fugitiveness of the rainbow, not the steadfastness of the day and 
night. 

" Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate 
With thine own tears all thou dost shine upon 
Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone ? 



266 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, 

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ? 

Ask why the sunlight not for ever 

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river, 

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, 

Why fear and dream and death and birth 

Cast on the daylight of this earth 

Such gloom — why man has such a scope 

For love and hate, despondency and hope ? 

" No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 
To sage or poet these responses given — 
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven 
Remain the records of their vain endeavour, 
Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, 
From all we hear and all we see. 
Doubt, chance, and mutability. 
Thy light alone — like mist o'er mountains driven, 
Or music by the night wind sent 
Thro' strings of some still instrument, 
Or moonlight on a midnight stream. 
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream," 

The melancholy, the agnosticism of all this are, of course* 
quite foreign to Wordsworth ; but not so, surely, is the idea 
which underlies the lines that follow — 

" Man were immortal and omnipotent 
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
Keep with thy glorious train, firm state within his heart. 

Thou messenger of sympathies 

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes — 
Thou — that to human thought art nourishment. 

Like darkness to a dying flame ! " 

Shelley's account of the development and purification of his 
sense of the unseen is very like Wordsworth's. 

" While yet a boy," he tells us, " I sought for ghosts " ; but 
he neither heard nor saw them. Then suddenly there was 
revealed to him the more excellent way, and he saw Beauty — 

" When musing deeply on the lot 
Of life, at the sweet time when winds are wooing 

All vital things that wake to bring 

News of birds and blossoming — 

Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ; 
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy ! " 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 267 

And we remember Wordsworth at Hawkshead, first terrified 
by the spirituality of Nature, then, in later days — 

" Only then 
Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 



O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings, 

Or beats the gladsome air . . . 

One song they sang, and it was audible." 

The last stanza of Shelley's Hymn is closely Words worthian, 
with an echo even of the Wordsworthian phraseology — 

" The day becomes more solemn and serene 
When noon is past — there is a harmony 
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky. 
Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen, 
As if it could not be, as if it had not been ! 
Thus let thy power, which like the truth 
Of Nature on my passive youth 
Descended, to my onward life supply 
Its calm — to one who worships thee, 
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 
To fear himself, and love all human kind." 

We are reminded, not only of the conclusion of Wordsworth's 
Immortality Ode, but of the moral of those very early lines 
Left on a Seat in a Yew Tree, which haunted Charles Lamb after 
his visit to Nether Stowey — 

" True dignity abides with him alone 
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, 
Can still suspect, and still revere himself. 
In lowliness of heart." 

Shelley speaks of his " passive youth ; " but that is not the 
impression left on us by his account of the attitude of young 
poets towards the secrets of things. Wordsworth might have 
more fittingly called his youth passive in this sense : he was the 
healthy, natural boy, whom Nature sought with her revelations, 

" More like a man 
Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
Who sought the thing he loved." 

Shelley, on the other hand, pursues Nature with shrill eager 



268 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

insistence ; follows her over the world and into every region of 
thought and feeling ; and will have her secret or die. That is 
the moral of Alastor's feverish quest and untimely end. 

But there were deeper affinities between Wordsworth and 
Shelley than any similarities of poetic training and tendency. 
They were alike as poets, in realizing, conceiving,'the Universe ; 
and realizing it as spiritual and guasz-persoml. This com- 
munity brings them closely into line as fellow-workers in the 
Romanticism of the nineteenth century. They two, indeed, 
share, and share almost equally, the honour of giving to British 
literature a truly philosophical poetry, of conceiving for poetry 
the ideality and unity of the world, with the conviction of the 
theologian or the constructor of a philosophy. What is Words- 
worth at his deepest and loveliest ? 

" I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thought ; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 

And the round ocean and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought 

And rolls through all things." 

These lines may be said to be Wordsworth's text ; they are 
the key to all his poetry. And an almost equal importance 
belongs to the lines from Shelley's Adonais, in which the 
phrases march with something of the finality of the clauses of a 
creed — 

" That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
That Beauty in which all things work and move. 
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
Which through the web of being blindly wove 
By man and beast and earth and air and sea 
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me." 

Every reader of both poets must recognize how representa- 
tive both those passages are ; how the conviction of all things 
as combined in, and informed by, a unity, to which it is not 
mere fancy to attribute thought and love, explained, for Shelley 
and Wordsworth alike, both the beauty of Nature and the 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 269 

destiny of Man. Wordsworth read the riddle as a realist, 
Shelley as an idealist ; but both were engaged on the same 
riddle, both found the same solution. Wordsworth attained his 
universal through the humble folk and temperate beauties 
among which he lived ; Shelley through courageous and 
boundless idealization, a new mythology, almost new heavens 
and a new earth. But both (religion and theology apart) were, 
without knowing it, worshippers in the same temple, heralds of 
the same hope. 

Also they were alike in their essential devotion to human 
interests in their poetry. It needs no exhaustive knowledge of 
Wordsworth to prove that mountains and lakes, cuckoos and 
daisies, were not his real themes, but Man, and his " unconquer- 
able mind " ; Man, Nature's child and spoiler ; whom Nature 
can punish or heal, but never rob of his lordship. Wordsworth 
went to school to Socialism and Revolution ; and what he 
learned in France determined his bent towards the poetry of 
fellowship for ever, made certain his farewell to " the heart that 
I lives alone." Nature was but the second person of the trinity 
on which he mused in his solitude ; the other two persons 
were Man and Human Life. Let us not be deceived as 
to Wordsworth's humanity by his comparative indifference to 
the interest of sex, and by the hodden gray and slow rustic 
movements of so many of his characters. No one needs to 
be reminded of the Sonnets Dedicated to National Inde- 
pende7tce and Liberty, and the passion with which they throb. 
But one might be tranced into ignoring the depths of tragedy 
and pathos, and of every kind of human interest hidden in so 
many homely-sounding little poems, in Lucy Gray, in the 
Matthew group, in Michael, in The Excursion — indeed, where 
not ? — unless one kept in mind that the high argument was not 
scenery, not landscape, but — 

" How exquisitely the individual mind 
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
Of the whole species) to the external world 
Is fitted : — and how exquisitely too 
(Theme this but little heard of among men) 
The external world is fitted to the mind." 

If the case was so with Wordsworth, it was equally so with 
Shelley. Matthew Arnold never made a stranger critical lapse 



270 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

than when he dismissed Shelley as a poet of clouds and sunsets, 
except when he proclaimed his failure as an interpreter of 
Nature. We need not ransack Shelley's biography in order to 
find evidence of his love of Man ; it is the pulse and nerve of 
his poetry. We have just reminded ourselves of the moral of 
A las for ; we have just seen the poet's commerce with Beauty 
issue in a kind of summary of individual and social perfection — 

" To fear himself, and love all human kind." 

The essential, central Shelley is not in lovely bye-play like 
T/ie Cloud and The Sensitive Plant, nor even in mystical 
invention like The Witch of Atlas. It is in The Revolt of Islam, 
Prometheus Unbomid, The Cenci, Hellas — works instinct with 
sociality, with morality. Even poems primarily and ostensibly 
of Nature, even the Skylark and the Ode to the West Wind, take 
all their deepest meaning from the human problem and struggle, 
over against which Nature is set. 

" We look before and after 
And pine for what is not ; 

Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 

" Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth ! 
And, by the incantation of this verse, 
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 
The trumpet of a prophecy ! " 

Finally, if both Wordsworth and Shelley were poets of Man, 
and especially of social Man, and such serious philosophic poets 
of Man as British literature had hardly known before, they were 
conspicuously fellow-workers in the task of interpreting Nature, 
twin-priests of her mysteries, twin-prophets of her message. 
Wordsworth's work in this capacity needs no insisting on. 
Readers have dwelt, only too readily and exclusively, on his 
merits as a poet of landscape. They have recognized that he 
at least, after the long spell of blindness or crooked vision, 
wrote of natural phenomena with his eye on the object ; at last 
spoke the "truth in love" of the common objects of the country. 
But Shelley's idealism has deceived many readers into the belief 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 271 

that his scenery was all invented : that his poetic world was 
fairyland, where realistic standards cannot be applied, and it is 
irrelevant to ask for truth of portraiture. And, so far as definite 
terrestrial effects are concerned, there is some justification for 
the belief, Shelley had the generalizing, not the particularizing 
habit in his Nature-work ; and the habit prompts him, when he 
is dealing with the surface of the earth and its vegetation, to 
idealize his objects beyond reality. This is very conspicuous in 
The Sensitive Plant, in which Shelley might, if he would, have 
given us a real garden, and does not do so. But there was left for 
him one province — the world of the atmosphere, of the clouds, 
winds, and dews — where his genius hampered him with no 
stumbling-blocks, where his idealism was the handmaid of an 
unapproached and unapproachable fidelity to fact. Nothing, 
even in Wordsworth, is so true to Nature as Shelley's atmos- 
pheric and meteorological poetry. The atmosphere was his 
home, his element, and he could not report falsely of it. The 
Cloitd is fantastic, if you will ; but every statement may be 
verified every day. It is because the skylark is a bird of the 
air beyond all others — because it sings at heaven's gate — that 
Shelley so loved it ; and it is because his poem is in the best 
sense realistic that it is so popular. The beauty of the Ode to 
the West Wind is in its truth ; its imagination is in its exacti- 
tude. And when the poet, at the climax of his passion, calls 

for identification with the wind — Be thoit me, impetuous one ! 

he does but proclaim himself as the very child and voice of the 
elements in the popular sense of the word. Such a poet of the 
weather, of water, air, and fire, so ethereal, so genuine, there 
had never been before. 

Wordsworth's kinship with Keats was much more distant 
than his kinship with Shelley. To the one poet Wordsworth 
himself was as deaf and blind as to the other. The well-known 
story of his comment when Keats read him the Hymn to Pan, 
from Endymion : A very pretty piece of paganism, fairly repre- 
sents, we may be sure, the kind of comment he would have 
made on the rest of Keats's poetry if he had known it. On 
the other hand, Keats was as much interested in Wordsworth 
as Shelley was ; and something is to be learned from his 
recorded feelings and opinions about him as to the relations, 
if any, between Wordsworth's work and his own. 



272 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Wordsworth never saw Shelley ; but Keats he met several 
times. They had a common friend in Haydon, the painter^ 
who took pleasure in bringing them together. In December, 
1 8 17, Wordsworth, with his wife and Dora, was in London. He 
visited his brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, at Lambeth, 
and saw many friends. The Lambs, of course, were much in 
his circle; Coleridge was at Highgate, and in sociable mood; 
the assiduous Crabb Robinson was everywhere to bear testi- 
mony. It was an important moment in British literature ; 
Coleridge had just published Biographia Liter aria, and was 
taking advice as to the wisdom of prosecuting Blackwood, of 
which the first number had appeared in October, for libel. 
Shelley's Revolt of Islam was just out, and so was Keats's first 
miscellaneous volume, which was to be followed by Endymion 
in the spring. Lalla Rookh was a poem of the year, and Cole- 
ridge was disgusted with it. Wordsworth did not please Crabb 
Robinson as much as usual on this occasion ; he thought him 
sometimes contradictory and egotistical, and inclined to be 
hard on Coleridge. When Keats first saw Wordsworth, he too : 
had an unpleasing impression. He thought him pompous and J 
stiff; he kept him a long time waiting when he went to pay his |i 
respects, and came into the room dressed to dine with another 
Commissioner of Stamps, looking grand in knee-breeches, silk 
stockings, and stiff collar. To the Bohemian, open-necked 
Keats this was repellent. Yet he wanted to see more of Words- 
worth, and Haydon arranged a dinner-party in his rooms for 
December 28th. Charles Lamb was there, and Wordsworth, 
and Keats's friend, Monkhouse. Everybody was at his best 
that day, though to Charles Lamb's best alcohol contributed 
considerably. There was much literary talk at dinner. Lamb's 
interventions in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn discourse} 
reminded Haydon of the Fool's interruptions of Lear's passion, j 
Lamb grew merrier and merrier. Wordsworth had been de- 
nouncing Voltaire. "Now," said Lamb, "you old lake poet, 
you rascally poet, why do you call Voltaire dull ? " A proposl 
of Newton's head in one of Haydon's pictures, they discussed I 
poetry and science. "A fellow," Lamb said of Newton, "who! 
believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of aj 
triangle!" Keats and he agreed that Newton's prism had| 
destroyed the rainbow, as Keats afterwards sang in Lamia — 



/ 

/ 

FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 273 

" Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; 
We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line. 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — 
Unweave a rainbow." 

In all the fun and extravagance Wordsworth heartily joined 
after his manner. After dinner an inimitable intellectual toady 
— like Wordsworth, a Comptroller of Stamps — turned up, and 
his platitudes gave Lamb — now more than half-seas-over — a 
great opportunity. " Don't you think, sir," said the new guest 
to Wordsworth, " that Milton was a great genius ? " The rest, 
though it has been told so often, must be told yet once more in 
Haydon's words. " Keats looked at me, Wordsworth at the 
Comptroller. Lamb, who was dozing by the fire, turned round 
and said, ' Pray, sir, did you say Milton was a great genius ? ' 

* No, sir ; I asked Mr. Wordsworth if he were not.' ' Oh,' said 
Lamb, ' then you are a silly fellow.' ' Charles ! my dear 
Charles ! ' said Wordsworth ; but Lamb, perfectly innocent of 
the confusion he had created, was off again by the fire. After 
an awful pause, the Comptroller said, * Don't you think Newton 
a great genius ? ' I could not stand it any longer. Keats put 
his head into my books. . . . Wordsworth seemed asking himself, 

* Who is this ? ' Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, * Sir, 
will you allow me to look at your phrenological development ? ' 
He then turned his back on the poor man, and at every question 
of the Comptroller he chaunted — 

" ' Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John 
Went to bed with his breeches on.' 

" The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who 
he was, said in a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of 
assured victory, ' I have had the honour of some correspondence 
with you, Mr. Wordsworth.' ' With me, sir ? ' said Wordsworth, 

* not that I remember.' * Don't you, sir ? I am a Comptroller 
of Stamps.' There was a dead silence ; the Comptroller evidently 
thinking that was enough. While we were waiting for Words- 
worth's reply, Lamb sung out — 

T 



274 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

'"Hey diddle, diddle, 
The cat and the fiddle. ' 

" ' My dear Charles ! ' said Wordsworth — 

"'Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John," 

chaunted Lamb, and then rising, exclaimed, * Do let me have 
another look at that gentleman's organs.' Keats and I hurried 
Lamb into the painting-room, shut the door, and gave way to 
inextinguishable laughter. Monkhouse followed and tried to get 
Lamb away. We went back, but the Comptroller was irrecon- 
cilable. We soothed and smiled and asked him to supper. He 
stayed, though his dignity was sorely affected. However, being 
a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and no ill 
effects followed. All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we 
could hear Lamb struggling in the painting-room, and calling 
at intervals, ' Who is that fellow ? Allow me to see his organs 
once more.* " 

Keats's feeling about Wordsworth wavered, but was on the 
whole respectful and appreciative. In a sonnet of 1816 he 
dedicated to him four sonorous lines — 

" Great spirits now on earth are sojourning 
He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake. 
Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake 
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing." 

He probably agreed with Leigh Hunt, who, with many 
grumbles, recognized Wordsworth as the foremost of the 
reformers of poetry after the post-Restoration lapse, whose work 
was celebrated by Keats in his Sleep and Poetry. Haydon 
proposed to send the sonnet to Wordsworth ; and Keats told 
him that the proposal put him " out of breath." " You know," 
he wrote, " with what reverence I would send my well-wishes to 
him." He was never weary of repeating the Intimations of 
Immortality Ode ; and in January, 1818, when he was fresh from 
personal intercourse with Wordsworth, he spoke of The Excur- 
sion as one of the few satisfactory artistic products of the time. 
On the other hand, he was riled by much in both Wordsworth's 
personality and his poetry. He wrote to his brothers that 
Wordsworth had " left a bad impression wherever he visited in 
town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry." Yet he maintained 
that he was "a great poet." He spoke of himself once as 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 275 

liking "half of Wordsworth." In a letter to John Hamilton 
Reynolds — who wrote the first skit on Peter Bell — he entered 
upon a subtle criticism of Wordsworth's achievement. He 
realized that the human heart was indeed, as Wordsworth 
claimed, the main region of his song. He wondered whether 
he had real " epic passion." He compared him with Milton. 
Both poets he felt to be partial, fragmentary ; he wanted 
Wordsworth to produce something more, something different. 
With a truly critical instinct he took the Tintern Abbey lines as 
representing Wordsworth at his best, and he evidently felt in its 
fulness the power of those lines — how firmly they front the 
mystery of life ; how clearly they see and show the light beyond 
it. Milton, he thought, had no such vision of the light. As for 
himself, he was but a child in knowledge of life, beginning to be 
conscious of its mystery and adversity, and of doors opening, but 
only into darkness. 

In the summer of 1818 Keats was walking with a friend in 
the Lake country, and of course called at Rydal Mount. To 
his disappointment and displeasure Wordsworth was at Kendal 
taking part in the General Election of the year ; so Keats could 
only leave a note on the mantelpiece. It was the election about 
which Wordsworth wrote his Addresses to the Freeholders of 
Westmorland ; and Keats, though much more indifferent to 
politics than Shelley and Byron, was of course on the Liberal 
side, and antagonistic to Wordsworth accordingly. 

Some months later, Keats was putting himself into a 
different poetic category from Wordsworth's, which he dis- 
tinguished as the " egotistical sublime," and as containing 
Wordsworth alone. He ranked himself, on the other hand, as a 
normal poet, Le. a non-moral one ; an artist without preferences, 
having "as much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imogen." 
Here he was deeply unjust to poetry ; but he was not unjust to 
himself. Indeed, if we combine Keats's two self-estimates — 
this one, namely, and his consciousness of himself as hardly 
beyond the stage of childhood in his poetic experience of life, we 
shall understand his art, and the slenderness of the tie which 
binds it to Wordsworth's. 

Keats did not live long enough to make the human heart or 
human life the main object — he hardly made it at all an object 
—of his song. He is perhaps the most non-moral poet in 



276 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

English, certainly the most non-moral English poet of modern 
times. And he was this not from any weakness, not from any 
error, but from a preoccupation with mere beauty which was 
entirely honourable and natural, and, as he himself recognized, 
belongs to the youth, the opening stage, of the poet's experience. 
He was not one to express at any time, like Shelley, his ecstasy 
in a " shriek " ; but his thirst for the beautiful, his joy in it, was 
of the kind which Shelley felt when he made his quest " and 
clapped his hands " at his discovery. Only, as to Shelley, the 
intellectual and moral revealed themselves in such close con- 
tiguity with the beautiful, that he could hardly for a moment 
cease to be a moral poet ; human error and human hope, as he 
conceived them, were interwoven with every show of Nature ; 
and beauty was raised, by the presence of its opposites, into the 
unearthly and divine. Keats had his moral moments, his brief 
essays at a " criticism of life." In his Ode to Melancholy and in 
the great lyrical apostrophe to sorrow in Endymion, he touches 
the harp with all his might, and reveals a pessimism which 
would be unendurable if it were not fugitive. Here and there 
in Hyperion, he utters, without ceasing to be his best self, 
wisdom as deep and as mellow as ever was Shakespeare's or 
Wordsworth's. 

" Now comes the pain of truth to whom 'tis pain ; 
O folly ! for to bear all naked truths. 
And to envisage circumstance, all calm. 
That is the top of sovereignty." 

The whole of Oceanus's speech in the second book, in which 
these lines occur, has exactly as much ethical as aesthetic value. 
It is very likely that if Keats had lived, lived beyond his intoxica- 
tion with beauty, his mere artist's satisfaction, he would have 
given us much poetry of a like strain. But, taking his frag- 
mentary bequest as it stands, we feel that the central Keats is 
in The Eve of S. Agnes, Lamia, the Ode to Autumn, the Ode to 
Psyche ; in poetry which shows him with a boundless appetite 
for the beautiful as the pleasurable, and not as an unearthly 
abstraction, but as actualized in beautiful things, taken indis- 
criminately from the earth and air, from Grecian mythology, or 
from mediaeval romance. The essential Keats is an artist, a 
painter of pictures for beauty's sake. And he is an artist, as 



FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 277 

we said, without preferences, "having as much delight in con- 
ceiving an lago as an Imogen," except, we may add, that his 
moral sense is hardly as yet enough developed to make him 
take much interest in either of them. 

Keats's non-morality, his love of " pretty pieces of Paganism," 
■removes him very far from Wordsworth. But we are here com- 
paring our poets, less with each other than with their predecessors ; 
we are thinking of them as, among them, restoring to English 
poetry certain great things which it seemed to have lost ; and 
the greater the unlikenesses within the band, the more interest- 
ing is the joint result. We have just quoted a passage from 
Keats which Wordsworth might have countersigned ; and, as for 
Paganism, it has been pointed out that Wordsworth himself had 
a moment when he cried — 

" Great God ! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

But it is not in such stray parallelisms that the fellowship of 
Keats and Wordsworth, or, indeed, the unity of all the great 
poets of the Romantic Revival, is to be found. Wordsworth 
and Keats were at least on the same plane in their sense, quick 
and novel and inspiring, of what Keats called the " poetry of 
earth " ; they both possessed what is the innermost nerve of 
poetry, the power of finding the beautiful, and showing it in 
their words to others for all time. And, different as, in many 
respects, their ideas of it were, they were both wise enough to 
know that beauty is a unity in diversity ; that it has its temperate 
and torrid zones ; its simplicities as well as its complexities ; its 
restraints as well as its licences; that it is here as well as 
yonder ; in the spirit as well as in the body. Both poets meet 
in the shelter of Shelley's phrase — 

" That Beauty in which all things work and move." 

In this comprehensiveness of the beautiful is to be found the 
community of that poetry of the early nineteenth century to 
which Wordsworth was so great a contributor. Hardly one of 
his peers and younger contemporaries, certainly not Southey, 



278 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

not Byron, not Scott, but was alive with a quick sense of beauty 
such as generations had not felt. It is the quickness, the 
novelty, the pulsing throb of the sense, which makes it impossible 
for the poets of the Romantic Revival to disown one another. 
Poets with the classical ideal, poets like Milton and Gray, 
splendid as are their services to the beautiful, do not give the 
feeling of novelty, of young enthusiasm, which the Romanticists 
gave. They too cannot disown, be disowned ; but they are in a 
separate province, the province held by tradition, by its majesty, 
its dignity, its repose. 

Wordsworth has often been compared with Milton ; but not, 
it seems, with any fruitful result. One may set the blank verse 
of the one beside that of the other to establish the inferiority of 
Wordsworth's. They were alike patriots, alike grave, moral, 
serious poets. But Wordsworth was an innovator and a restorer ; 
and it was no tradition, Miltonic or other, that he restored, it 
was of his own underived, vigorous individuality that he gave. 
In spite of his sobriety, his narrowness, his cold welcome of 
novelty, the world in which he lived was a new world, and he 
saw and felt it anew, with an untaught and enthusiastic mind. 
His poetry was no product of culture ; it was the immediate 
reaction of an original mind to the beautiful significance of 
things. And it was the same with his peers. They all felt the 
world afresh ; and as they felt, they sang, a harmony of many 
voices. 



\ 



CHAPTER XIII 

AFTERGLOW 

YDAL MOUNT, to which the Wordsworths moved from 
Grasmere in 1 813, is one of the most purely ideal poets* 
residences in the world. Hidden, like the nest of a shy bird, 
from wanton eyes and approaches, it looks out frankly in 
two directions. It stands on a spur of Nab Scar, rising with 
sudden steepness from the road, just at the angle — almost 
a right angle — between the valley containing Rydal lake, and 
the valley along which the Rothay flows to Windermere, Down 
this latter valley, past Loughrigg and across the light smoke- 
wreath of Ambleside, the homely frontage of the house looks 
southward to the distant gleam of the lake. With a yet nobler 
and more subtly suggestive outlook, a door in the western gable, 
and the rocky terraces to which it leads, show Rydal water and 
its island, the northern side of Loughrigg, and the way to Gras- 
mere. On the eastern side lies, unseen from the Mount, the 
fine park-like demesne of Rydal Hall, with the wild heights and 
recesses of Fairfield in the background. 

The house and grounds, save for some modernizing of 
windows, and the hand of time on shrub and tree, have been 
hardly changed since the Wordsworths lived and died there. 
There are the same pleasant low-roofed sitting-rooms, the same 
broad central staircase, the twisted chimneys, the bedrooms where 
the poet and his wife and sister died. There is the same view- 
point southwards, led to by descending and ascending steps. 
Above all, there is the extension and expansion of what gave 
Dove Cottage its chief charm — a simple and yet ingenious land- 
scape-gardening ; steps, terraces, shrubbery, summer-houses ; 
rocky paths, pink with Wordsworth's own geranium, and yellow 
with the pale poppy, which haunts all dwellers among the Lakes. 

279 



280 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Rydal Mount has a spaciousness and dignity which dwarf poor 
little Dove Cottage and its tiny hanging-orchard into very 
humble stature. Yet in both places there is the same spiritual 
suggestion ; the same essential dignity ; the same undying 
association. Here, as there, is a perfect setting for " plain living 
and high thinking," the fitting abode of a Nature- worshipper, 
for whom the humblest flower and loneliest rock speak the 
language of a Universal Mind and Heart ; here, as there, we see 
and hear the same stooping, burly, austere, carelessly clad figure, 
somewhat harsh in voice and feature, but with eyes of infinite 
expression, muttering lines of verse as he paces up and down 
his terraces, or lies at length on daisy-sprinkled grass. Rydal 
Mount was a fit place for the kind of star-gazing that the Words- 
worths loved ; for the stars seemed to touch the hilltops at the 
back, while among the trees in the valley southward they 
twinkled like lamps. Wordsworth drew from them a parable 
of his poetic mission. " If thou indeed," he exclaims, addressing 
the Poet— 

" If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, 
Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light 
Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content : 
The stars, pre-eminent in magnitude, 
And they that from the zenith dart their beams, 
(Visible though they be to half the earth. 
Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness) 
Are yet of no diviner origin, 
No purer essence, than the one that burns, 
Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge 
Of some dark mountain ; or than those which seem 
Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps. 
Among the branches of the leafless trees. 
All are the undying offspring of one sire : 
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, 
Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content." 

An increase of income, won not without much difficulty, en- 
abled the poet to go to the larger house, and become something 
of a country gentleman on a small scale. Lord Lonsdale made 
him Commissioner of Stamps for Westmorland, with a salary 
of ;i^400 a year, and the modest Wordsworth was thus enabled 
to snap his fingers at mere literary profits. But it was chiefly 
to escape from the shadow of death at Grasmere, from the daily, 



AFTERGLOW 281 

hourly sight of his children's new graves, that he finally left the 
dear Vale. The moment had come, which comes now and 
again in most lives, when a new leaf must be firmly and reso- 
lutely turned. And so Wordsworth, at forty-three, entered on 
the last thirty-seven years of his life. 

When one thinks of these figures, and looks at the mass of 
poetry yet to be produced by Wordsworth, it may seem mere 
paradox to speak of the move to Rydal as a sunset, and the life 
there as afterglow. And, indeed, it may be put in much too 
paradoxical a way. Matthew Arnold, with the best intentions, 
did Wordsworth a disservice when he spoke as if his only good 
poetry had been composed between 1798 and 1808. The 
contrast between Wordsworth's best work and his merely good, 
or even that between his best and his worst, striking as it is, is 
not miraculous ; and his later, his Rydalian work, is full of 
interest for all lovers of him and lovers of poetry. Yet it is 
unquestionable that Wordsworth did not live or produce at his 
fullest strength after he went to Rydal Mount. He became 
prematurely elderly ; his verse lost much of its passion and 
felicity ; his splendid patriotism tended towards a prejudiced 
insularity ; his fine instinct for public righteousness towards a 
querulous and close-fisted conservatism. Wordsworth's youth 
in one sense departed so early ; the mood of the Tintern Abbey 
lines and the Immortality Ode, the mood — so to call it — of 
Nevei'more ! set in so soon and so permanently, that at forty- 
three Wordsworth, who was always old-fashioned, had become 
really old. If he had lived to be a hundred, he would hardly 
have been older in spirit in 1870 than he was in 1820. 

Passionate movements rocked the crust of British life while 
Wordsworth lived at Rydal. Liberalism, with its lurid portents 
and solid achievements ; the poetry of Shelley and Keats ; 
scientific development and mechanical invention ; Tractarianism ; 
Chartism ; but of none of them did Wordsworth sing ; in none 
of them did he take other interest than that of a rather languid 

!and often disapproving spectator. His days and his verse flowed 
on serenely ; his fame steadily and noiselessly grew ; his hair 
silvered, his high-nosed face grew grimly lined ; then, unex- 
pectedly, he sickened and died when he was just eighty. Hardly 
any fresh light or heat was given out during the thirty-seven 
years. It was mostly afterglow. 



282 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

So far as quantitative production went, there was no sign of 
stint or decline. In 1814 appeared The Exmrsion, which 
Wordsworth meant to be, and which in many respects is, of his 
ripest work ; but that, as we know, was first conceived at Race- 
down, and the greatest part of it was written at Grasmere. It 
was issued from Rydal Mount with a preface, and a Dedicatory 
Sonnet to Lord Lonsdale, somewhat in the strain, though with 
none of the spirit, of the days of pre-Johnsonian patronage. 
Waterloo year, 18 15, is very important in Wordsworth's biblio- 
graphy, for then appeared the first collected edition of his 
poems, and also The White Doe of Rylstone. As for The White 
Doe, we remember that he introduced De Ouincey to it in 
1807; but it was regularly begun at Stockton-upon-Tees, and 
completed at Dove Cottage. Among the collected poems there 
was one new one of great importance — a noble first-fruits of 
Rydal Mount — Wordsworth's finest classical poem, Laodamia. 
He himself once, in one of his flashes of excessive self-esteem, 
put it with Lycidas in a unique class. If that was too bold, it is 
not too much to find in Laodamia a genuine phase of the Greek 
spirit, the Greek restraint, the Greek subordination of personal 
emotion to public obligation, expressed in English verse of 
the stateliest grace. Laodamia wins back the spirit of her 
slaughtered lord, Protesilaus, but only to learn from his lips 
the philosophy of an emotion transcending and outlasting even 
the holiest nuptial passion ; to hear a description of Elysium 
touched with hues of the Christian heaven. 

" Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control 
Rebellious passion ; for the gods approve 
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul." 

" He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel 
In worlds whose course is equable and pure ; 
No fears to beat away — no strife to heal — 
The past unsighed for, and the future sure ; 
Spake of heroic arts in graver mood 
Revived, with finer harmony pursued ; 

" Of all that is most beauteous — imaged there 
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams. 
An ampler ether, a diviner air, 
And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; 
Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day 
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey." 



AFTERGLOW 283 

Here is taught the lesson of ideal widowhood, but in 
vain — 

" Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend — 
Seeking a higher object. Love was given, 
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end ; 
For this, the passion to excess was driven — 
That self might be annulled : her bondage prove 
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love." 

Laodamia could not take the lesson : as the Spirit retired from 
her, she died in her rebellious passion — 

" And, as for a wilful crime, 
'; By the just Gods, whom no weak pity moved, 

' Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, 

I Apart from happy Ghosts," 

and the poem ends in tragic hopelessness. 

In the same first Rydal year was written another classical 
poem, Dion. Dion of Syracuse, the rich warrior who forsook 
wealth for philosophic poverty, and was driven from Sicily to 
attach himself to Plato at Athens, showed himself in Words- 
worth's "study of imagination " as a kind of swan-like being, an 
image of " haughtiness without pretence," unfolding " a still 
magnificence." The poet sees him Plato's pupil, learning the 
secret of high life — 

" What pure homage i/ien did wait 
On Dion's virtues, while the lunar beam 
Of Plato's genius, from its lofty sphere. 
Fell round him in the grove of Academe, 
Softening their inbred dignity austere ; 

That he, not too elate 

With self-sufficing solitude. 
But with majestic lowliness endued, 

Might in the universal bosom reign, 
And from aftectionate observance gain 

Help, under every change of adverse fate." 

But alas ! he goes back to Syracuse as a vulgar conqueror, and 
his hands are reddened with blood. The poet calls on Academe 
to mourn — 

" Mourn, hills and groves of Attica ! and mourn 
Ilissus, bending o'er thy classic urn ! 
Mourn . . . 



284 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

For him who to divinity aspired 
Intent to trace the ideal path of right 
But He hath overleaped the eternal bars." 

A hideous spectre appears to him ; the spectre of the lower life 
into which he has gone down. He sinks into death ; and for 
him there is no resurrection. Nothing but a stern moral 
survives — 

" Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends, 
Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends, 
Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends." 

Yarrow Visited is another of the Rydal first-fruits which the 
world will not willingly allow to decay. In 1814 Wordsworth 
paid his second visit to Scotland, this time with his wife and her 
sister, Sarah Hutchinson. There was no Dorothy to write 
another journal ; and the commemorative poems are few. But, on 
a September day, Wordsworth, with James Hogg, the " Ettrick 
Shepherd," and a certain Dr. Anderson (whose collection of 
" British Poets " had introduced Wordsworth to Chaucer and 
the Elizabethans) walked from Traquair into that Vale of 
Yarrow which he would not see eleven years earlier. What he 
found there is perhaps too well known to be written out here. 

Waterloo and its sequels brought forth at last the Thanks- 
giving Ode of January, 18 16, with some flanking poems. One 
turns to them with interest to see how they compare with the 
great anti-Napoleonic sonnets. They are fine and impressive, 
though they lack the fresh fire of the early sonnets. 

It is plain that for Wordsworth the battle of Waterloo 
closed an epoch : the monster, begotten of the French Revolu- 
tion, was laid low ; the killing spell was lifted off the world, and 
by providentially chosen Britain. Thenceforward Wordsworth's 
social and political feeling took the normal Conservative course ; 
the fort of English liberty, the fort of English religion, secured 
by a perfectly balanced constitution, a perfectly reformed Church, 
were to be held at all costs. Wordsworth's Rydalian muse was 
a faultless conformist. 

The records of hardening conformity are abundant, both in 
prose and verse. Towards the Liberal movement which set in 
in the 'twenties of the nineteenth century, and which led to the 



AFTERGLOW 285 

Reform Bill and other great measures of constitutional and 
administrative amendment in the 'thirties, Wordsworth felt an 
aversion which was natural, and may or may not have been 
justifiable ; but his dismal vaticinations, his conviction, uttered 
with accompaniment of inarticulate groans, that Liberalism, — 
whether it took the form of Catholic Emancipation, of the 
rationalizing of Parliamentary representation, the advocacy of 
vote by ballot, or even of municipal reform, — was a mere process 
of ruin, are hardly more than psychological eccentricities. He 
wrote doleful letters to his friends. A great poetry born of 
emotion so baseless there could hardly be. Typical of the mood, 
alike in its sincerity and its weakness, are the lines which Words- 
worth discharged on the innocent head of his first grandchild in 
1834. Oppressed by the thought of what might lie before the 
infant, he gives expression to his fears. He cannot make up 
his mind whether the child has been born too early or too late. 
He sees " ensigns of mimic outrage unfurled," and he asks — 

" Who shall preserve or prop the tottering Realm ? 



I 



If to expedience principle must bow ; 

Past, future, shrinking up beneath the incumbent Now ; 

If cowardly concession still must feed 

The thirst for power in men who ne'er concede ; 

Nor turn aside, unless to shape a way 

For domination at some riper day ; 



If office help the factions to conspire, 

And they who should extinguish, fan the fire — 

Then, will the sceptre be a straw, the crown 

Sit loosely, like the thistle's crest of down ; 

To be blown off at will, by Power that spares it 

In cunning patience, from the head that wears it." 

and so on, through leagues of dreary heroics. 

Wordsworth's feeling about the Church was richer and more 
positive, and lent itself to a better poetry than his feeling about 
the State. It is interesting to trace his relations to the revival 
in the Church of England which had its most widely known 
expression in the so-called Oxford Movement. Long before 
the Movement was born, long before Keble published T/ie 
Christian Year, Wordsworth had departed somewhat from the 
ordinary Protestant view current in his youth, of the ecclesiastical 



286 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

history of the seventeenth century. In 1822 he had incurred 
censure by his favourable estimate of Laud. On the other hand, 
though his churchmanship steadily grew more definite and 
jealous as years went on, though he lived to declare his general 
sympathy with what has been called the " Catholic Revival," he 
never at any time showed the genuine Tractarian animus. His 
full reverence for Milton was never soiled by controversial 
prejudice. One compares Keble's recorded impression of 
Presbyterian churches with Wordsworth's poem, written in 1831, 
On the Sight of a Manse in the South of Scotland — 

" Say, ye far-travelled clouds, far-seeing hills — 
Among the happiest-looking homes of men 
Scattered all Britain over, through deep glen, 
On airy upland, and by forest rills, 
And o'er wide plains cheered by the ark that trills 
His sky-born warblings — does aught meet your ken 
More fit to animate the Poet's pen, 
Aught that more surely by its aspect fills 
Pure minds with sinless envy, than the Abode 
Of the good Priest : who, faithful through all hours 
To his high charge, and truly serving God 
Has yet a heart and hand for trees and flowers. 
Enjoys the walks his predecessors trod. 
Nor covets lineal rights in lands and towers." 

Fancy Keble writing such a poem ! 

The chief poetic monument of Wordsworth's churchmanship 
is the long series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the greater number 
of which were published as "Ecclesiastical Sketches" in 1822, 
though some were written earlier and some later. The sequence 
traces the story of English Christianity from its introduction to 
the " Present Times." The impulse to make it came from the 
sight of a new church on the Beaumonts' estate in Leicestershire. 
Much the same feeling was stirred in the poet's mind when the 
Rydal chapel was built below the Mount by the Flemings, that 
chapel in which he for the last time bent the knee a few weeks 
before his death. At various points the sonnets reflect Words- 
worth's characteristic attitude in churchmanship — the modera- 
tion, the Protestantism, of his Anglicanism. Here is no 
aversion from Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer ; here is even the 
traditional view of the Scottish Covenanters — 



AFTERGLOW 287 

** Slain by Compatriot-protestants that draw 
From councils senseless as intolerant 
Their warrant." 

Wordsworth's typical parish-priest uses his authority, neither 
at the altar nor in the confessional, but in the pulpit (No. i8). 
The sonnets are not all historical : some deal with aspects 
of ritual, baptism, matrimony, and what not. And they end 
with a fine vision of the stream of English Church history and 
its goal — 

" The living Waters, less and less by guilt 
Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll. 
Till they have reached the eternal City — built 
For the perfected Spirit of the just ! " 

Towards the expression of the poetry of his own neighbour- 
hood and of the Lake country at large, Wordsworth did much 
in the Rydal days. The privacy of his larger demesne 
favoured his chosen method of composition ; up and down his 
terraces he would walk, growling, murmuring, booing (as his 
humble neighbours called it) his lines. Often they lack inspira- 
tion of feeling and felicity of phrase ; often the didacticism is too 
prominent, the moralizing too trite. Now and then, however, 
there is all that one could wish of landscape spiritualized. 

A more delightful sonnet sequence than the Ecclesiastical 
Sonnets is the series to the River Duddoiz, the stream that rises 
west of the Langdale Pike region, and falls, after a short 
course, into the Irish Sea. Many a sight and sound in the 
Rydal Mount garden, or among the stately trees of the Hall ; 
many a vision of star hanging over the trees, or glow-worm 
clinging to the rock, yielded its secret to the poet as he grew 
old in his last home. Among the finest of these later Nature- 
poems are those classed by him as Evening Voluntaries ; and 
among them the very finest is the sunset-picture, " Composed 
upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty." 
Written in 1818, it can in no sense be said to belong to old 
age ; yet it expresses what we recognize as Wordsworth's final 
view of some of the mysteries with which he dealt in the Im- 
mortality Ode. In this aspect it is very important. 

Standing on his view-point in front of the house, the poet 
sees an unparalleled afterglow in the western heavens. He 



288 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

reads in it, not a conventional vision of the past, but an ideal 
of the beyond, of the future. No choirs of angels, singing 
between sky and earth, could be more moving than the natural 
spectacle — 

" This silent spectacle — the gleam — 
The shadow — and the peace supreme ! " 

Yet there is more in the sight than the purely natural ; 
there are agencies at work more august than the purple 
evening — 

" From worlds not quickened by the sun 
A portion of the gift is won." 

The hills, climbing towards the boundless glory, are a 
parable of the vision of old age, of the compensation, beyond 
life, for life's pain and loss. 



I 



" Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad, 
And see to what fair countries ye are bound ! 
And if some traveller, weary of his road, 
Hath slept since noon-tide on the grassy ground, 
Ye Genii ! to his covert speed ; 
And wake him with such gentle heed 
As may attune his soul to meet the dower 
Bestowed on this transcendent hour ! " 



1 



In this vision the poet finds a restoration of what he had 
deplored the loss of in the Immortality Ode. It is but a gleam, 
indeed ; but it is the true lost light. And so he prays — 

" Dread Power ! whom peace and calmness serve 
No less than Nature's threatening voice, 
If aught unworthy be my choice. 
From Thee if I would swerve ; 
Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light 
Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 
Which, at this moment, on my waking sight 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored ; 
My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
Rejoices in a second birth ! " 

The shade of difference between this mood and that of the 
last stanza of the Immoi'tality Ode^ is the difference between the 
earlier and the later Wordsworth, between the Wordsworth of 
poetic, and the Wordsworth of religious, faith. Whether the 



I 




WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

FROM THE PAINTING BY H. W. I'ICKEIJSGILI. IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY 



AFTERGLOW 289 

change was not made at some cost of imagination is open to 
question. 

A considerable part of Wordsworth's Rydal life was spent 
in travelling. Visits to London there frequently were ; visits 
which brought the rural poet into contact with old friends like 
Lamb, Coleridge, and Crabb Robinson ; fellow-craftsmen like 
Rogers, Moore, and Crabbe. There were tours in Scotland, 
tours on the Continent, which yielded large crops of thoughtful, 
but hardly inspired, verse. 

Fruition, which, in Wordsworth's case, never took a pecuniary 
form, came at last in the better shape of fame. In the course 
of the 'thirties, in the moment of pause between the living 
renown of Byron, and the coming importance of Tennyson and 
Browning, England's high places awoke to a sense of Words- 
worth's rank. Cambridge, his own university, bowed before 
him ; in 1839 came his open triumph at Oxford, when, amid 
the thunders of the Theatre, he received his Doctor's degree. It 
is not difficult to call up the strong bony figure in the scarlet 
robe, and the dignity of the wrinkled face ; not difficult to see 
Keble in the rostrum, and hear the Latin sentences in which the 
poet of The Christiaii Year claimed academic honour for the 
poet of poverty, philosophy, and religion. Bunsen was there to 
be honoured with Wordsworth. Dr. Arnold was looking on, 
having come from Rugby for the day ; Robertson of Brighton, 
still an undergraduate, was there, rather shocked, in his early 
enthusiasm, by the pomp in which the simple unworldly poet 
was made to share. Never, by general consent, did the old 
walls echo to more rapturous applause. 

A few years later, when Southey died in 1843, came the 
Laureateship. At first Wordsworth refused, fearing, in his 
seventy-fourth year, the " duties " belonging to the office. But 
Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, wrote that there was no 
purpose of imposing duties, but only of paying " that tribute of 
respect which is justly due to the first of living poets." And 
he added, as he well might, that there was no question as to 
who should be selected. 

" The first of living poets." That, after all the vicissitudes 
of Wordsworth's reputation, was the national judgment. Yet 
even then the poetic pause was at an end ; the old order was 
changing and giving place to new. When the laurel was set on 

P " 



290 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Wordsworth's brow, Tennyson was a famous poet ; Browning 
had published Paracelsus and Strafford and Pippa ; Matthew 
Arnold was an undergraduate at Oxford, with poetry ready to 
come. Wordsworth had several pleasant meetings with his 
successor in the Laureateship, and he cordially recognized his 
achievement and promise. In 1845, when the old poet made 
his official appearance at the State ball, in Rogers's uniform 
borrowed for the occasion, he saw Tennyson several times, and 
applied to him Peel's phrase about himself, " the first of living 
poets." Tennyson expressed cordial appreciation of Words- 
worth, and was greatly pleased by Wordsworth's cordiality to 
him. He remembered how, when he dined in Wordsworth's 
company, Wordsworth said to him, "Come, brother bard, to 
dinner " ; and took his arm. Tennyson gave Wordsworth the 
impression that he was "not much in sympathy with what I 
should myself most value in any attempts, viz. the spirituality 
with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, 
and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit 
its most ordinary appearances." He congratulated Tennyson 
upon Dora, as being a success in a line which he had often 
attempted, but in which he had never succeeded. 

What Wordsworth knew of Browning's poetry we cannot 
tell. He took a kindly interest in Elizabeth Barrett and her 
writings ; and when she and Browning married, in 1846, he 
wrote that she had married a very able man. And he added 
sardonically, " Doubtless they will speak more intelligibly to 
each other than they have yet done to the public." 

As the growing light of fame fell on Wordsworth, a shadow 
came on his home life. Dorothy's companionship, which, since 
his childhood, had been the main human influence in his life, 
was withdrawn from him, gradually, but steadily. At the age 
of fifty-six she had a serious illness, while she was keeping house 
for her nephew, John Wordsworth, at Whitwick, near Lough- 
borough and Coleorton ; and she never properly recovered from 
it. In 1832 her brother was writing, "Coleridge and my 
beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect is most 
indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, pari passu, 
along the path of sickness ; I will not say towards the grave, 
but I trust towards a blessed immortality." Dorothy's life was: 
prolonged beyond the limits of her brother's ; but never again 



AFTERGLOW 291 

was she able to quit the " path of sickness." She dropped, very 
gradually and gently, but very steadily, into that saddest valley 
of the shadow, where life ebbs with maimed intelligence. Her 
decline was hastened by the death, in 1835, of Mrs. Wordsworth's 
sister, Sarah Hutchinson, who had been for a long time a 
beloved member of the family. She retained her general 
intelligence, her literary task, and literary memory ; but of the 
present she took no heed. The radiant, eager Dorothy ! She 
is clearly remembered still, wheeled about the garden at the 
Mount, and scattering, as in better days, nods and smiles on 
those she knew and loved. 

Dorothy's fate saddened Wordsworth's afterglow; but his 
were the "years that bring the philosophic mind," his was a 
tranquillity of resignation, a " calm of mind, all passion spent,'' 
which made such sorrow a fortification, not a weakening or 
overthrow. And there was much to compensate : happy family- 
life, with patriarchal satisfaction ; deep friendships ; the sense of 
slow, well-earned fame, bringing modest admirers to look on 
their poet face to face. 

It is a pleasant picture that Sir John Taylor Coleridge, 
nephew of the poet, and father of the Lord Chief Justice of the 
future, gives of the Wordsworths as he saw them in 1836, and it 
may be taken as fairly representative of their aspect at that 
period. Coleridge was with his family at Fox How, lent by 
the Arnolds for six weeks ; and the Rydal Mount people were 
their only neighbours. In the mornings Wordsworth was busy 
with the proofs of the first six-volume edition of his complete 
poems ; in the afternoons he was ready for long walks. Cole- 
ridge tells us how delightful these walks were made by the 
poet's talk — by its raciness of the soil, its evidence of minute 
natural and local observation, of insight into character, of 
sympathy with the homeliest types. He was struck by Words- 
worth's interest in landscape-gardening. He describes a little 
scene in the grounds of Rydal Mount. He found Wordsworth 
in anxious dialogue with his gardener. "James and I," said he, 
" are in a puzzle here. The grass here has spots which offend 
the eye ; and I told him we must cover them with soap-lees. 
' That,' he says * will make the green there darker than the 
rest.' * Then,' I said, * we must cover the whole.' He objected : 
* That will not do with reference to the little lawn to which you 



^92 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

pass from this.' 'Cover that,' I said. To which he replies, 
'You will have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage 
surrounding it' " 

Wordsworth was always ready to talk of poetry, including 
his own ; though as to the latter it seemed to Coleridge that he 
showed no forwardness. He let his companion into some of the 
secrets of his " diction " ; telling him how his narrative poems 
were all founded on fact ; how, when his stories were acquired 
by hearsay, he used in his poems the very words which they were 
told, " dropping all vulgarisms and provincialisms." He showed 
abundantly his extreme verbal and metrical fastidiousness ; and 
blamed his constant analysis of, and theorizing about, emotion, 
for some injury of which he was conscious to his aesthetic sensi- 
bility and poetical power. 

But more than any literary criticism, Coleridge admired 
Wordsworth's gracious personality ; his kindly, sympathetic 
ways with his humbler neighbours ; his fine, sturdy pedestrianism, 
as he " trudged " along (Coleridge chose the word because it 
seemed to express the "boldness" of his gait) in his plaid 
jacket and waistcoat, with the too frequent green shade over his 
unhappy eyes. When they parted, Coleridge was able to say 
that the more he saw of Wordsworth, the more he admired him 
as a poet and as a man. 

Wordsworth's two sons, his eldest and youngest child, John 
the clergyman, and William, his father's successor in the Com- 
missionership, both married happily in their father's lifetime, 
and their wives and children added to the poet's happiness. 
But his heart was most garnered up with his one daughter, 
Dora. Born in 1804, Dora had her ripening girlhood during the 
early time at Rydal, and she remained in the nest until 1841. 
She grew up into a slender graceful woman, with much of her 
mother in her, and especially her mother's candid trust-inspiring 
eyes. In 1841, when she was thirty-seven, she made a marriage 
which was full of promise. Twenty years before, there had come 
to live in the neighbourhood a very interesting man named 
Edward Quillinan. His father was a merchant trading with 
Portugal, and Edward was born at Oporto. His father's com- 
mercial career was interrupted by the French invasion of the 
Peninsula ; and Edward entered the army, seeing a good deal 
of service here and there in the pre-Waterloo days. In 1817 he 



AFTERGLOW 293 



( 



married a Miss Bryder, the daughter of a baronet. In spite of 
his mercantile and military pre-occupations, Quillinan was a 
man of literary sympathy and ability ; and he had been a reader 
and admirer of Wordsworth while Wordsworth's reputation hung 
in the balance. Quartered in Penrith in 1820, he rejoiced in his 
nearness to the poet ; and, when he left the service in the 
following year, he settled close to him — at Rydal Cottage- 
There, in 1822, his wife was burned to death, leaving him with 
two daughters, of whom the younger, Rotha, — called after the 
sweet river of Grasmere and Rydal lakes — was Wordsworth's 
god-child. Soon after, the widower went to Kent; but the 
friendship with the Wordsworths suffered no check ; there were 
interchanges of visits, and there was much literary sympathy. 
Quillinan wrote poetry as well as prose ; and he used his skill 
in Portuguese to translate the Lzisiads of Camoens. In 1841 he 
took Dora Wordsworth as his second wife. Wordsworth greatly 
valued Quillinan's friendship, but he disliked the idea of the 
marriage, partly, perhaps, because Quillinan, brought up a Roman 
Catholic, had never formally renounced his faith. But the chief 
obstacle was his jealous affection for his daughter, that kind of 
appropriating, clinging affection, by which many a father has 
spoiled a daughter's life before and since. All the same, the 
marriage took place ; and the omens were fair. The Quillinans 
had no children, and they were able to be a good deal at Rydal 
Mount, so that the pain of separation was lessened. They spent 
one winter at Ambleside ; and they were a good deal at the 
large square house on Belle Isle, Windermere, which he who 
crosses the lake by the ferry can see looking out at him from 
the trees. But Dora's health began to give way ; a winter in 
Portugal was tried, about which Dora wrote books : A Journal 
of a Few Months' Residence in Portugal^ and Glimpses of the South 
of Spaiji. She wrote them at Loughrigg Holme, quite close to 
Rydal, where she and her husband seemed at last to have found 
a settled home, where both could follow their literary pursuits in 
peace, under the patriarchal shadow of the Mount. But death 
was inexorable, and claimed her in the high summer of 1847, 
when she had been just a year at the Holme. We can imagine 
what the blow must have been to the old man of seventy-seven. 
He wrote no verse about it ; and his utterance in letters has the 
restraint we should expect. To one friend he wrote : " We bear 




WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

up under our affliction as well as God enables us to do." And 
to another : " Our sorrow, I feel, is for life ; but God's will be 
done ! " When, less than three years later, the poet was on the 
brink of the River, his wife said to him : " William, you are 
going to Dora." Woke one morning by the entrance of one of 
his nieces, he said, " Is that Dora ? " And, when all was over, 
Mrs. Wordsworth went to Dorothy and said : " Dear, he has 
gone to Dora." 

Wordsworth never suffered the vulgar inquisitiveness which 
pestered Tennyson at Farringford. Pilgrims were many, indeed, 
but they were reverent ; and Wordsworth, unlike Tennyson, 
mostly enjoyed their visits. His circle in the latter days at 
Rydal Mount was large enough, and distinguished enough, to do 
him ample honour. For the most part it was very different from 
the earlier one. The old familiar faces were mostly gone. As 
in an august funeral procession they pass before us in the 
Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg. 

One familiar face remained to the end, and beyond it. 
Wordsworth's son, writing by his father's dead body, called 
Samuel Rogers, his father's " oldest, perhaps, living friend." 
Rogers holds a curious place in English literature. Born in 
1763, and living until 1855, he spanned nearly a century, a 
century of portentous literary change. Twenty, or thereabouts, 
when Johnson died and Cowper published his Task, he was past 
thirty when Keats was born, and alive when Tennyson had 
been Poet Laureate for five years. He produced poems — The 
Pleasures of Memory in 1792, and Italy in 1822 to 1828 — poems 
of pensive reminiscence and well-bred description — of which 
everybody has heard, and everybody in the future probably will 
hear, the names ; but which no mere lover of poetry probably 
will ever read. No one, even in his own day, thought of putting 
Rogers among the great poets ; yet he might have been Poet 
Laureate at almost any period of his life, and he held a kind of 
respected mastership among all the poets. This was partly due 
to his Maecenas-like qualities ; to his hospitable sympathy with 
men of letters ; to his wealth and splendid house in St. James's 
Place, where great men met at sumptuous breakfasts, and heard 
the good stories and small-voiced epigrams — not always good- 
natured — of the caustic little man. A bald head and wrinkled 
face, cadaverous in its paleness, and blue eyes which Carlyle 




DORA WORDSWORTH (MRS. QUILLINAN 

BY MARGARET GILLIES 



AFTERGLOW 295 

called both "sorrowful" and "cruel," is shown in the pictures 
of Rogers. But if there was cruelty in his nature, and if it 
spoke out at times in his talk, there went with it enough 
kindness to make him famous as a good friend and a good 
man. 

Rogers and Wordsworth first met at Grasmere in 1803, just 
before the first Scottish expedition. When Wordsworth, Dorothy 
and Coleridge set out Rogers followed them, and they were 
together at Dumfries. Thenceforward the friendship stood 
steady, founded on genuine mutual respect. Rogers turned 
up at the Lakes occasionally ; and Wordsworth, when in town, 
was always a welcome guest in St. James's Place. Rogers once 
introduced him to Charles James Fox. He was always willing 
to mediate between authors and publishers ; and he helped 
Wordsworth about the production of The Exairsion, and others 
of his poems, and advised Dorothy as to the printing of her 
journal of the 1803 Scotch tour. Wordsworth gave wooden 
commendation of Italy, and dwelt on his daughter Dora's 
appreciation of it. In 1848, after Dora's death, the affection 
of the two old men — Roger was eighty-five — found beautiful 
expression. Wordsworth closed a letter to Rogers thus : 
" Believe me, my friend of nearly half a century, very affection- 
ately yours," a strong phrase from him ; and Rogers, in his 
reply, exclaimed : " What delightful days have we passed 
together, walking and sitting wherever we were, and more 
especially among the rocks and waters of your enchanting 
country. Oh that they were to come over again ! You may 
well conceive how much you were in my mind during your long, 
long trial. Pray remember me to those who remain with you, 
her [Dora's] dear, dear mother and aunt, and pray believe me to 
be your grateful and affectionate friend." 

Another link with the early days long remained in poor 
Hartley Coleridge, Coleridge's eldest son, and too like his father 
in inconstancy of purpose, and inability to achieve results. We 
remember him in 1807, when he was eleven, scampering down- 
hill when De Quincey escorted his mother to Dove Cottage, 
and rushing in first to greet the occupants. He was always 
a pet of Wordsworth's. When he was six years old he had 
inspired Wordsworth to write one of the most exquisite lays of 
childhood in existence. 



296 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

" O Thou ! whose fancies from afar are brought ; 
Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel, 
And fittest to unutterable thought 
The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol ; 
Thou faery voyager ! that dost float 
In such clear water, that thy boat 
May rather seem 

To brood on air than on an earthly stream ; 
Suspended in a stream as clear as sky, 
Where earth and heaven do make one imagery," etc. 

With so wretched a home, and so unhappy a parentage on 
the paternal side, the boy needed outside guardians and helpers. 
Southey did much for him. When he was seventeen, Wordsworth 
wrote to that incarnation of benevolence, Thomas Poole, to ask 
for his advice in Hartley's behalf. It was not easy, he said, to 
determine what the youth was fit for ; his talents were con- 
siderable ; his knowledge was patchy. Poole, of course, was 
ready, not only with advice, but with money ; and at last, 
Hartley went up to Oxford, where he got a Postmastership at 
Merton. His talents stood him in good stead at Oxford ; for, 
in 1 8 19, he obtained one of the Oriel Fellowships, which in 
those days were Oxford's greatest prizes. But what was the 
good of it ? He was " irregular " ; and one of his irregularities 
was intemperance. Altogether, he was too irregular for Oriel ; 
and he never got beyond the probationary year of his Fellow- 
ship. Wordsworth said that his father's aspiration for him had 
been too literally fulfilled — 

" But thou, my child, shalt wander like a breeze." 

Like a breeze, indeed, the poor little creature — "lile Hartley," 
as he was fondly called at the Lakes — wandered for the rest 
of his life. A little journalism in London ; brief spasms of 
schoolmastering at Ambleside and Sedbergh ; the writing 
of some poetry, too beautiful to be wholly fugitive, and, latterly, 
years of desultory poetizing and pedestrianism in the Lake 
country, radiating from that Nab Cottage between Rydal and 
Grasmere whence De Quincey took his wife. In the 'forties 
"lile Hartley," with his squat figure, dark eyes, and bright 
merry face was as familiar about the haunted paths as the 
stately Wordsworth, and, by the rustics at least, more loved. 
For "lile Hartley" was always in the mood for a friendly 



AFTERGLOW 297 

salutation ; and his queer, uncertain gait, his ways with his 
walking-stick, his hurryings and stoppings, made him a lovable 
eccentric. Wordsworth, on the other hand — so it was reported 
by one of the rustics — would pass you " as if you was nobbut a 
stoan " ; and he was chary of greetings to children. From so 
dear a fellow as Hartley even poetry could he endured, thought 
the Westmorland rustics ; but Mr. Wordsworth, "booing" and 
murmuring his lines, his lips going upon the road, though he 
might be "cleverish," what was the good of him if he wouldn't 
give you the time of day, and look as if he enjoyed himself? 
Indeed, it was darkly hinted by the rustic mind that Hartley 
did most of Wordsworth's poetry for him. There was, at any 
rate, much trafficking between the Mount and the Nab ; Hartley 
borrowed Mr. Wordsworth's books ; and Mr. 1 Wordsworth would 
often look in at the Nab of an afternoon ; there would be long 
talks ; and then the two would come out, arm-in-arm, and pace 
back to Rydal together. 

The rustics might be wrong in the inferences they drew 
from the intimacy of the two men ; but they were not wrong 
as to the fact. Much of the admiring, anxious, affectionate 
solicitude which Wordsworth had felt for S. T. Coleridge was 
bestowed on his not dissimilar son. And Wordsworth was to 
outlive the son as he had outlived the father, as he had outlived 
nearly all his contemporaries. Poor Hartley died in 1849, the 
year before Wordsworth's death. The rustics noticed that Mr. 
Wordsworth paid " lile Hartley " a daily visit while he lay on 
his deathbed, and they reported that he "took communion wi' 
him at the last." Wordsworth was not with him at the moment 
of his passing ; but when he heard that he was gone, he said 
to Derwent Coleridge, his brother, "Let him lie by us — he 
would have wished it." And the next day the two men went 
to Grasmere churchyard, and a solemn little scene was transacted. 
Wordsworth bade the sexton measure out his own and his wife's 
grave, and then another, behind, for Hartley Coleridge. " When 
I lifted up my eyes from my daughter's grave," Wordsworth 
said, "he was standing there!" Then he turned to the sexton 
and said, " Keep the ground for us, we are old people, and it 
cannot be for long." 

Harriet Martineau, who wrote harshly about both Words- 
worth and Hartley Coleridge, wrote gently about the last of 



298 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Hartley. " I witnessed his funeral," she wrote, " and, as I saw 
his grey-headed old friend bending over his grave that winter 
morning, I felt that the aged mourner might well enjoy such 
support as could arise from a sense of duty faithfully performed 
to the being who was too weak for the conflicts of life." And 
again, " When nothing more than pity and help was possible, 
Wordsworth treated [Hartley] as gently as if he had been (what 
indeed he was in our eyes) a sick child." 

The social side of Wordsworth's later years was chiefly 
determined by some strong friendships, and by certain felicities 
of neighbourhood, which brought the Arnolds to Fox How ; 
Mrs. Fletcher and her family to Lancrigg ; and Harriet 
Martineau to the outskirts of Ambleside. Then there were 
the many pilgrimages of admirers, and meetings, here and 
there, with younger men of letters. 

Wordsworth was the worst of correspondents. He had 
always disliked the act of writing ; and the frequent attacks of 
inflammation of the eyes from which he suffered, latterly with 
increasing frequency, added real disability to distaste. Yet to 
the very last he would not suffer any friendships to die for 
want of epistolary nutriment. 

One of the most substantial of his later friendships was with 
William Rowan Hamilton, the great Irish mathematician, who 
invented " quaternions." Hamilton was one of those men of 
supreme mathematical- genius who disprove the vulgar notion 
of the isolation of mathematics among the affairs of the mind 
and spirit He loved poetry, and longed to be a poet. When 
he was young, he and his sister were constantly writing verses and 
sending them to Wordsworth for criticism. Wordsworth was 
by no means indifferent to mathematics. He was educated at 
a college pre-eminent in mathematics. All his readers know 
how, as he lay in bed in his rooms at John's, he could see much 
of Trinity, even — 

" The antechapel where the statue stood 
Of Newton with his prism and silent face, 
The marble index of a mind for ever 
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." 

In another part of The Prelude he narrates how to him, in 
his student days, " poetry and geometric truth " seemed between 



AFTERGLOW 299 

them to possess a monopoly of immortality and exemption from 
disease. Still, it was poetry rather than mathematics that 
Hamilton and Wordsworth conferred and corresponded about. 
They met first in September 1827, when Hamilton, aged twenty- 
two, was visiting the Lake country, and a very real friendship 
was cemented in spite of the inequality in age. The two men 
had a wonderful midnight walk in which — as Hamilton's 
biographer puts it — they " oscillated between Rydal and 
Ambleside, absorbed in converse on high themes, finding it 
almost impossible to part." 

In 1829 Wordsworth visited the Hamiltons at Dunsink, to 
their great joy. Hamilton was now Irish Astronomer-Royal ; 
and Wordsworth stayed at the Observatory. Mrs. Hamilton 
has recorded her impression. She " saw, approaching the house, 
a tall man, with grey hair, a brown coat, and nankeen trousers," 
looking as unlike her preconceptions as possible — 

" And is this Wordsworth ? this the man 
Of whom my fancy cherished, 
So faithfully a waking dream 
An image that hath perished." 

So she parodied inwardly, as she watched her realized ideal at 
lunch. She saw, in the first place, great reserve ; then she saw 
rusticity, simplicity, and dignity ; none of which qualities, 
apparently, had formed part of her conventional idea of a poet. 
And she added what we can well believe to show deep insight : 
other men did not seem necessary to Imn. His intellectual and 
moral loftiness struck her so much that she could no longer 
think any of his poetry " silly." What she had thought silliness 
was but the stooping of a great nature, to which nothing was 
common or unclean. He seemed to her " sublime " ; and, when 
he was still only fifty-nine, " a divine old man." 

Next year Hamilton stayed three weeks at Rydal Mount ; 
and correspondence, about poetry, science, and politics, went on 
at intervals throughout the poet's life. There was an interesting 
time in 1844, when Hamilton was staying with R, P. Graves at 
Windermere, another guest being Archer Butler. Julius Hare 
was staying at Fox How ; and Graves had Wordsworth, 
Hare, and Edward Quillinan to meet Hamilton and Butler. 
Before he left the Lakes on that occasion, Hamilton celebrated 



300 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

his relations with Wordsworth by writing an impromptu sonnet 
in Dora's album at Rydal Mount, in which he described the 
change from the " unquiet transport " of a mere disciple to the 
" calmer joy " of a friend. In 1846, through Hamilton's influence, 
Wordsworth was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish 
Academy. 

Another stimulating and enlarging correspondence was with 
the American Henry Reed, Professor at Philadelphia, though 
the two men never saw each other in the flesh. Reed was 
Wordsworth's American editor, and they corresponded much 
on international copyright and other themes. It was a good 
thing for so insular an Englishman as Wordsworth to have a 
transatlantic correspondent. There was not much in the 
" Great Republic" to attract one who believed that the English 
Constitution, before the Whigs began to desecrate it, was 
perfect ; but Wordsworth did admit to Reed that he had as 
little or less faith in absolute despotism. Nay, in 1843, he did 
not " conceal that, as far as the people are capable of governing 
themselves, he was a Democrat." 

In the last summer of his life Wordsworth received a friend 
of the Professor, Mr. Ellis Yarnall, of Philadelphia, who has 
left a record of his impressions. He walked from Ambleside to 
the Mount, feeling, much as De Quincey had felt in 1807, that 
" after long years of waiting, of distant reverential admiration 
and love," he was about to see a man who had so thrilled him 
across the ocean with the power of his words. He arrived at 
the early dinner-hour, and Wordsworth left the table to receive 
him at the door. " It could be no other — a tall figure, a little 
bent with age, his hair thin and grey, and his face deeply 
wrinkled. The expression of his countenance was sad, mournful 
I might say ; he seemed one on whom sorrow pressed heavily." 
He insisted that Mr. Yarnall should join them at their meal in 
the little dining-room ; Mrs. Wordsworth was there, with three 
grandchildren. They talked of American affairs ; Mrs. Words- 
worth going on with her knitting after dinner. It was the year 
of the Californian gold-fever ; but Mr. Yarnall was tactful 
enough to speak of American progress only in so far as it meant 
an extension of the English tongue. Wordsworth looked up at 
this, with " a fixing of his eye as if on some remote object," and 
remarked that it behoved those who wrote to see to it, that 



AFTERGLOW 301 

what they uttered was on the side of virtue. Of Henry VIII. 
he spoke to his guest with positive loathing. The subsequent 
conversation ranged widely. They spoke of France, just through 
the '48 upheaval. He recalled his youth there among the 
scenes of the great Revolution, and said, " I should like to 
spend another month in France before I close my eyes." They 
spoke of Modern Painters, the two first volumes of which were 
now before the world. Wordsworth thought Ruskin a brilliant 
writer, but regretted his too exclusive partisanship of Turner. 
They spoke of the " Oxford Movement," which had by this 
time more than run its early course. Wordsworth registered 
his definite approval. " I foresaw," said he, " that the movement 
was for good, and such I conceive it has been beyond all 
question." 

Mr. Yarnall noticed the quality of Wordsworth's talk ; how 
choice his words were; how faultless seemed each sentence. 
When he was with him in the open air, he marked, as others did, 
the poet's habit of stopping frequently to emphasize something 
he was saying, and again and again he saw the far-away look 
in the eyes, and the fire of genius unquenched by nearly eighty 
years. Wordsworth was evidently feeling his age ; he wistfully 
asked what age men reached in America } They went to see 
the Rydal waterfall before they parted on the Ambleside road. 
As they walked, Wordsworth gave to a beggar — the fifth or 
sixth, he said, to whom he had given that day. Mr. Yarnall 
left him, he reported to Reed, "in a tumult of excitement." 
He felt that a great man, great morally, and great intellectually, 
had passed from his sight — a man who seemed " living as if in 
the presence of God by habitual recollection." 

As early as 1841, Wordsworth was introduced to Emerson's 
writings, but they had no message for him. He could not away 
with the style, and wrote sarcastically to Reed about "a 
language which he (Emerson) supposed to be English." Yet 
Emerson had made a pious pilgrimage to Rydal in 1833, s-^^d 
had a long talk with Wordsworth, in which apparently there 
was not much love lost. Emerson's animus is very different 
from Mr. Yarnall's. He described Wordsworth as "a plain, 
elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by 
green goggles, called in by his daughters \sic\y The bulk of the 
conversation naturally was on American affairs ; and though 



302 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Emerson only reports Wordsworth's remarks, he does so with 
a scornful innuendo which cannot be mistaken. Wordsworth, 
unfortunately, took the lead in transatlantic criticism ; and (it 
was the year after the Reform Bill) was in his most dolefully 
didactic vein. In his literary criticism, as Emerson reports 
him, he did not get beyond wooden platitudes, and denuncia- 
tions born of imperfect knowledge and insight. He thought 
Carlyle, though clever and deep, sometimes insane. He was 
so disgusted with the first part of Wilhelm Meister that he 
threw the book across the room. He had always wished that 
Mr. Coleridge would write more to be understood, etc. Emerson 
admitted Wordsworth's kindness and courtesy, his truthfulness 
and modesty. But he found " hard limits " to his thought ; he 
" made the impression of a narrow and very English mind ; of 
one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and 
conformity." One may resent the animus of all this ; but one 
recognizes the truth in it. 

The fact is that Emerson and Wordsworth stood too near 
each other, and yet had too sharp differences of method and 
medium to realize their spiritual kinship. Carlyle, who was 
wanting in Emerson's suavity and tolerance, was even more 
inappreciative of Wordsworth. Wordsworth thought of Carlyle 
as merely a clever and rather dangerous man who did not know 
how to write English. Carlyle thought of Wordsworth as an 
overpraised literary lion with a very feeble roar. He saw him 
occasionally in London, early in the 'forties, when the poet's 
living reputation was at its highest ; and he recalled his 
memories in the miserable early days of his widowerhood, when 
the heavens above him were as brass, and all his life seemed 
vanity and a striving after wind. What he has to say of 
Wordsworth is unsympathetic, and therefore, in a sense, value- 
less as criticism ; yet the shrewdness of his insight and his 
inimitable power of expression give it the value of partial 
truth. Even the most reverent Wordsworthian may allow 
himself the sly enjoyment of this : " A man recognizably of 
strong intellectual powers, strong character ; given to medita- 
tion, and much contemptuous of the unmeditative world and its 
noisy nothingnesses ; had a fine limpid style of writing and 
delineating, in his small way ; a fine limpid vein of melody too in 
him (as of an honest rustic fiddle, good, and well handled, 



AFTERGLOW 303 

but wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable 
of much ! ) " Or even this : " To my private self his divine 
reflections and unfathomabilities seemed stinted, scanty, palish, 
and uncertain . . . and I reckoned his poetic storehouse to be 
far from an opulent or well-furnished apartment ! " 

Carlyle remembered best a literary breakfast in St. James's 
Street in or about 1840, given by Henry Taylor, at which he 
found himself in Wordsworth's company. James Spedding was 
another of the guests. Wordsworth talked much, and more, 
apparently, about the mechanism of verbal expression than 
Carlyle cared for, Carlyle's sketch of his appearance and 
utterance ought to be given at first hand. " His voice was 
good, frank, and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct, and 
forcible, rather than melodious ; the tone of him businesslike, 
sedately confident ; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being 
courteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain 
breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran. You would have said 
he was a usually taciturn man. . . . His face bore marks of 
much, not always peaceful, meditation ; the look of it, not bland 
or benevolent, so much as close, impregnable and hard ; a man 
multa tacere loqtiive paratus, in a world where he had ex- 
perienced no lack of contradiction, as he strode along! The 
eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness ; there 
was enough of brow, and well shaped ; rather too much cheek 
. . . face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the 
head itself was (its 'length' going horizontal) ; he was large boned, 
lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood, 
a right good steel-grey figure, with rustic simplicity and dignity 
about him, and a vivacious strength looking through him." 

Carlyle and Wordsworth had several other meetings. At 
one of them they talked of the French Revolution ; and Carlyle 
was interested in AVordsworth's personal experiences of it. On 
another occasion they talked of English poetry ; but from this 
conversation Carlyle carried off no idea save of Wordsworth's 
literary self-esteem. What he liked best in the poet was his 
vigorous word-painting of famous men he had known in early 
days. "Never, or never but once, had I seen a stronger 
intellect, a more luminous and veracious power of insight, 
directed upon such a survey of fellow-men and their contem- 
porary journey through the world." 



304 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

The two men evidently neither loved nor understood one 
another ; what was wesentlich in each was, on the whole, hidden 
from the other. Yet, in the play of Hamlet, there is much besides 
the character of Hamlet that is interesting and important, and 
Carlyle's hard unsympathetic flashes on Wordsworth's accidents 
are not without some value in helping us to understand his 
essence. Let us leave this phase with one little picture, by 
no means rich in significance, and yet called by Carlyle, " sym- 
bolical of all." Carlyle and Wordsworth were dining in company 
somewhere in London, while Wordsworth was a lion there. 
" Dinner was large, luminous, sumptuous ; I sat a long way 
from Wordsworth ; dessert, I think, had come in, and certainly 
there reigned in all quarters a cackle as of Babel (only politer, 
perhaps), which far up in Wordsworth's quarter (who was leftward 
on my side of the table) seemed to have taken a sententious, 
rather louder, logical and quasi-scientific turn, heartily unim- 
portant to gods and men, so far as I could judge of it and of 
the other babble reigning. I looked upwards, leftwards, the 
coast being luckily for a moment clear ; there, far off, beautifully 
screened in the shadow of his vertical green circle * (which was 
on the further side of him, sat Wordsworth, silent, slowly but 
steadily gnawing some portion of what I conceived to be raisins, 
with his eye and attention placidly fixed on these and these 
alone. The sight of whom and of his rock-like indifference to 
the babble, quasi-scientific and other, with attention turned on 
the small practical alone, was comfortable and amusing to me, 
who felt like him, but could not eat raisins." 

Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor met for the first 
time in the summer of 1832, at Moresby, but they had corre- 
sponded previously. Wordsworth passed a day on the banks of 
Wast Water in Landor's company, and evidently liked the man. 
He thought him original and learned as well as modest ; and he 
enjoyed his hearty laughter. Landor was Southey's friend ; 
and Southey kept him in Italy au courant of Wordsworth's work 
in poetry. Landor cordially, though critically, admired Words- 
worth. "The first poet that ever wrote," he once said, "was 
not a more original poet than he is, and the best is hardly a 
greater." Wordsworth, in his turn, said that he would rather 

* Carlyle noticed that Wordsworth, for the relief of his poor eyes, carried a 
circular green shade, which could be unfolded and stuck in a stand. 



AFTERGLOW 305 

have written some of Landor's verses than any poetry produced 
in his time ; and he greatly admired the Imaginary Conversations, 
when they began to come out in 1824. They met again in 
1836, in London ; and this time, unhappily, things went wrong. 
Wordsworth went to London in May, to see his friends and to 
see Talfourd's play Ion, with Macready in it, about which there 
was a flutter of expectation in literary circles. The first per- 
formance was at Covent Garden ; and the first-night audience 
included Wordsworth, Crabb Robinson, Joanna Baillie, and 
Landor. When Wordsworth appeared in a box, with his green 
spectacles on, the audience cheered him. He shook hands with 
Joanna Baillie in the adjoining box; took off his spectacles, 
and looked round the house, nodding to those he recognized. 
He seemed sad, and as if smiling were difficult. However, he 
sat patiently through the long play, thumping applause from 
time to time with his stick. 

It was at Talfourd's house that Wordsworth and Landor met ; 
and Landor resented Wordsworth's tone about his friend 
Southey. He thought, too, that Wordsworth's dislike of Goethe 
was due to jealousy, and not to mere misconception. He was 
vehement and impulsive, and he turned on Wordsworth, satiriz- 
ing him, and even stooping so low as to parody We are Seven, 
Crabb Robinson, who lamented Wordsworth's insensibility to 
the merit of such great foreigners as Goethe and Voltaire, but 
knew that it came from nothing worse than a wooden John 
Bullishness of mind, remonstrated with Landor, but to no pur- 
pose. The friendship was blighted. In December, 1842, Landor 
attacked Wordsworth in Blackwood in an Imaginary Conversa- 
tion between Porson and Southey ; and in April, 1843, Edward 
Quillinan rushed in, in Wordsworth's defence, with an Imaginary 
Conversation between Landor and Christopher North. Words- 
worth disapproved of his championship, chiefly because he 
thought Landor beneath notice. He characterized him in 
language unusually strong for him. " His character," he wrote 
to Rowan Hamilton, "may be given in two or three words — a 
madman, a bad man, yet a man of genius, as many a mad- 
man is." 

Crabb Robinson himself was one of the best friends, as 
friends, that Wordsworth ever had. He was intensely apprecia- 
tive, and yet perfectly aware of the poet's limitations, and not 



306 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

afraid to point them out to him, when he thought them discredit- 
able. He was much in Wordsworth's company, not only in 
London when the poet chanced to be there, but many times at 
Rydal, and during the continental tour in 1837. Robinson 
spent the Christmas season of 1835 at Rydal in a cottage just 
below the Mount. He arrived early on Christmas Day, to find 
a comfortable fire burning in his lodgings, and tea and sugar 
provided by the housewifely hands of Mrs, Wordsworth. It 
was always at the same season that he paid his subsequent 
visits. Mrs. Wordsworth valued his buoyant spirits as a stimu- 
lant for her husband in the dark days ; but Robinson insisted 
on being in lodgings, that he might have his breakfast and milk 
supper under an independent roof. These winter visits became 
an institution, and the lively barrister was looked on as one of the 
family at Rydal Mount. " No Crabb, no Christmas ! " Edward 
Quillinan used to say. We have no pleasanter picture of those 
days of afterglow than that which the diarist has sketched for 
us. The Arnolds, let us remember, were at Fox How ; Dr. 
Arnold was in his full vigour. Robinson would read in bed 
of a morning, and occupy himself indoors until it was time 
to go to the Mount for the one-o'clock dinner. Or there 
might be quite a long walk with Wordsworth before dinner, 
and in the dusk of the afternoon a stroll to Ambleside for the 
newspaper. On Sunday, Dr. Arnold would preach ; or at least 
they would meet him after church, and there might be deep 
theological talks. How wholesome for Wordsworth, in those 
days of his conservative despair, to have to encounter, in the 
frosty or rainy weather, the nimble Whig wits of Arnold of 
Rugby and Crabb Robinson, both of whom were perfectly 
reverent, but neither of whom, we may be sure, would give the 
poet any dialectic handicap ! The Doctor would attack Milton's 
Satan as not wicked enough ; and Wordsworth, as they trudged 
along, would point out the cunning of the art in Paradise 
Regained ; would tell once more the story of the genesis of the 
Ancient Mariner ; or would discourse on the significance of the 
sonnet. Wordsworth would tell Dr. Arnold how Robinson 
helped him through the winter ; and Robinson would climb into 
the coach, after his six weeks' stay, with a heart full of tender- 
ness and regret. 

In those days of the 'thirties, before Dora's marriage, and 



AFTERGLOW 307 

while Wordsworth's public fame was ripening, the nearness of the 
Arnolds was a great enrichment of the Rydal Mount life. Fox 
How, under Loughrigg, turning its back on the sun, but with 
its face to the mountains between Wansfell and Fairfield, to which 
the Arnolds came in 1833, was closely associated with Words- 
worth from the beginning. The poet gave his help in the 
formalities of the purchase ; he advised as to the building of the 
new house ; he directed the laying out of the delightful grounds. 
He was especially insistent about the chimneys ; like his own 
at Rydal, they must have some colour, a bit of red and a bit of 
yellow ; and they must be partly square and partly round. The 
builders remembered how " Wudsworth " and the Doctor would 
argue about this matter. 

The rustics remembered also that Wordsworth and Dr. 
Arnold were " ter'ble friends ; " but the records of their actual 
intercourse are not very abundant. There must, of course, have 
been antagonism ; for there was not only the Doctor's Whiggism, 
but his impassioned distrust of that Anglican Revival with 
which Wordsworth was more and more inclined to sympathize. 
On the other hand, Wordsworth would like Arnold's sturdy 
Protestantism ; and — but why should one try to explain the 
intimacy of two great men, however divergent, in any respects, 
they might be? Great educators, great Christians, great 
Englishmen, could they meet day by day " in the silent woody 
places," and among the perpetual hills, far from the din of con- 
troversy, and not rush together in the great communions of 
thought and feeling ? Strange that Wordsworth had to outlive 
so long the eager reformer young enough to be his son ! In 
June, 1842, there dawned at Rugby the summer morning when 
Arnold heard the sudden call — 

" Thou arosest to tread 
In the summer morning, the road 
Of death, at a call unforeseen." 

Much less comfort was in the proximity of Harriet Marti- 
neau. Between her and Wordsworth there was indeed a 
potential antagonism which it would have been hard to trans- 
cend. Logical, materialistic, utilitarian, she gave her talents to 
causes which were far removed from Wordsworth's ideals. More- 
over, she had an acrid tongue, and an eye quick to see weaknesses 
and blemishes. 



308 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

She came to Ambleside in the spring of 1845 resolved to 
make it her home ; and, within a year, had bought land about a 
mile from the town on the Rydal road, and built herself a house, 
which she called " The Knoll." She came with the defiant self- 
consciousness of heterodoxy, foreseeing that provincial respect- 
ability would frown upon her, and resolved to have as few 
dealings with it as possible. The iclaircissement of her heresies 
was delayed until 1851, when Wordsworth had passed beyond 
time ; and he received the new-comer graciously. After his 
fashion, he gave practical help in the laying out of her little 
domain. He threw himself down among the hazel bushes on 
the site of the future house, and discussed architectural points 
with her. When she began farming her two acres, he came to 
see her first calf. As a great man, he had, of course, to plant a 
tree ; and she remembered his workmanlike way of doing it, 
and how he washed his hands afterwards in the watering-pot. 
He washed them that he might give them both to her, and wish 
her many happy years in her new home. "Then," the acrid 
lady goes on to tell us, " he proceeded to give me a piece of 
friendly advice. He told me I should find visitors a great 
expense, and that I must promise him (and he laid his hand on 
my arm, to enforce what he said) I must promise him to do as 
he and his sister had done, when, in their early days, they had 
lived at Grasmere. * When you have a visitor,' said he, ' you 
must say : if you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are very 
welcome ; but, if you want any meat, you must pay for your 
board. Now promise me that you will do this.' " 

As Dorothea, in Middlemarch, remarked to her sister, it is 
only certain people who see the moles on a hero's face, and Miss 
Martineau was one of them. But the moles are generally there ; 
and perhaps it is well, in the interests of realism, that there is 
always somebody disagreeable enough to notice them. Miss 
Martineau was struck by the combination of extreme economy 
and generosity displayed by the Wordsworths. One could 
hardly get a drop of cream with one's tea at Rydal Mount, and 
yet Wordsworth would outrage political economy by giving 
away his milk to cottagers who were quite able to buy it for 
themselves. Miss Martineau's visits to the Mount were few, 
though she was always welcome there. In fact, she says that 
she went only twice. She kept young servants, and was afraid 



AFTERGLOW 309 

to leave them even for a few hours. She had no carriage; and 
it was a mile and a half from The Knoll to Rydal Mount. But 
they often met in the open air ; and it was a pleasure to the 
clever deaf woman to see the poet on a winter's day in "his 
cloak, Scotch bonnet and green goggles." Unlike some other 
observers, she reports him as evidently popular among children. 
Half a score of them would accompany him on the road — one 
"pulling at his cloak, or holding by his trousers" — while he 
would cut switches out of the hedge for them. He would 
indulge in a little heavy fatherly badinage at her expense. He 
would rally her on her walking-powers, though he ought to have 
known that she was no walker. Meeting her one day with 
her collaborator Atkinson, " * There, there ! ' " said he, laying his 
hand on Atkinson's arm. " ' Take care ! take care ! Don't let 
her carry you about. She is killing off half the gentlemen in 
the county ! ' " 

She noticed the change wrought on Wordsworth by his 
daughter's death, and thought him somewhat selfish in his 
grief. His wife's personality attracted her more than his own. 
" Her excellent sense and her womanly devotedness (especially 
when she grew pale and shrunk and dim-eyed under her mute 
sorrow for the daughter whom he mourned aloud) made her by 
far the more interesting of the two to me." 

A charming family lived at Lancrigg in Easedale in those 
days. A certain Archibald Fletcher, a Scottish Advocate of 
very advanced reforming views, who died in 1828, had married 
Eliza Dawson, a delightful woman of refined tastes and literary 
gifts. Some years after her husband's death, Mrs. Fletcher 
came often to the Lake country with her children. The first 
visit was in the summer of 1833, while Fox How was building, 
and the Arnolds were temporarily occupying Wordsworth's old 
house, Allan Bank, The Fletchers had lodgings in a farmhouse 
in Easedale, close to Lancrigg, which was to be their future 
home. It was a sad summer to Wordsworth, because it was 
then that Dorothy's illness became pronounced ; but he always 
brightened up when he walked over into Easedale and saw 
the old views and the new friends. Both Mrs. Fletcher and her 
daughters, Mary and Margaret, who afterwards married respec- 
tively Sir John Richardson and Dr. John Davy, younger brother 
of Sir Humphry, have left memorials of their impressions of 



310 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Wordsworth. As he had acted for the Arnolds about Fox 
How, so he did for the Fletchers about Lancrigg. In 1840 they 
settled in, and for the next ten years were much to Wordsworth. 
He loved his visits to Lancrigg, and all he did and said was 
seen and heard by eyes and ears of love, not of mere gossippy 
intelligence. There were many meetings and many walks, of 
which the reminiscences fill up and round off our idea of the poet. 
This, for instance, of the shortest day of 1843: "Wordsworth 
and Miss Fenwick came early, and although it was misty and 
dingy, he proposed to walk up Easedale. . . . He said on the 
terrace, * This is a striking anniversary to me ; for this day 
forty-four years ago, my sister and I took up our abode at 
Grasmere, and three days after we found out this walk, which 
long remained our favourite haunt.' There is always something 
very touching in his way of speaking of his sister ; the tones of 
his voice become more gentle and solemn, and he ceases to 
have that flow of expression which is so remarkable in him on 
all other subjects. It is as if the sadness connected with her 
present condition was too much for him to dwell upon in con- 
nection with the past, though habit and the ' omnipotence of 
circumstance ' have made its daily presence less oppressive to 
his spirits. He said that his sister spoke constantly of their 
early days, but more of the years they spent together in other 
parts of England than those at Grasmere." Here again is a 
little picture which tells us something. On January 22, 1844, 
Mrs. Fletcher's grandson Henry was starting for Oxford. " His 
young cousins and I," writes Mrs. Davy, " went down with him 
to wait for the mail in the market-place [of Ambleside]. We 
found Mr. Wordsworth walking about before the post-office 
door, in very charming mood. His spirits were excited by the 
bright morning sunshine, and he entered at once on a full flow 
of discourse. He looked very benevolently on Henry, as he 
mounted on the top of the coach, and seemed quite disposed to 
give an old man's blessing to the young man entering on an 
untried field, and then (nowise interrupted by the hurrying to and 
fro of ostlers with their smoking horses, or passengers with 
their carpet bags) he launched into a dissertation ... on the 
subject of college habits, and of his utter distrust of all attempts 
to nurse virtue by an avoidance of temptation. He expressed 
also his entire want of confidence (from experience, he said) of 



AFTERGLOW 311 

highly-wrought reh'gious expression in youth. The safest train- 
ing for the mind in religion he considered to be a contemplating 
of the character and personal history of Christ. ' Work it,' he 
said, ' into your thoughts, into your imagination, make it a real 
presence in the mind.' " 

There was a great celebration of the poet's seventy-fourth 
birthday at Rydal Mount on April 9, 1844. Lady Richardson 
wrote of the tables spread in front of the house, and of a con- 
course of Grasmere boys and girls, " Their eyes fixed with 
wonder and admiration on the tables covered with oranges, 
gingerbread, and painted eggs, ornamented with daffodils, 
laurels, and moss, gracefully intermixed." She tells how the 
children played hide-and-seek among the shrubs, and how 
pleased the old man was with it all. 

Besides the Lancrigg ladies, one other woman held an 
intimate place in the Wordsworth circle in the latter days. 
Henry Taylor, author of PJiilip van Artevelde^ and famous for 
his splendid looks, had a connection — a cousin of his stepmother 
— called Isabella Fenwick. She was much older than Taylor, 
being, in fact, only about twelve years younger than Words- 
worth. She was a very remarkable woman ; fine-looking, 
strong-minded, deeply religious, and yet — what deeply religious 
women and men sometimes fail to be — well versed in varieties 
of human nature, and therefore humorous, charitable, and free 
of spirit. She was much of an educator, much of a hero- 
worshipper. Over Henry Taylor, as long as he was unmarried, 
she had much influence, and loved to exercise it. When he 
married. Miss Fenwick transferred herself to Wordsworth. 
Taylor, who had known Wordsworth for many years, kindled 
the lady's interest in him. In 1830 she was at Rydal Mount 
for the first time. In the 'thirties Miss Fenwick had a house m 
London, and Wordsworth stayed with her on his way to the 
Continent in 1837. Next year she settled at Ambleside, and 
began to feed herself on Wordsworthian air. In 1838 she was 
writing enthusiastically to Henry Taylor about her intercourse 
with the poet, and he was reading The Prelude (which he was 
then revising) to her. Crabb Robinson reported that Words- 
worth talked well to her and that she understood him. She 
regarded him with that intensity of interest and that depth of 
insight which only a woman feels and exercises. "What strange 



312 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

workings," she wrote to Taylor, " there are in his great mind, 
and how fearfully strong are all his feelings and affections ! If 
his intellect had been less powerful, they would have destroyed 
him long ago ; but even in the midst of his strongest emotions, 
his attention may be attracted to more intellectual speculation, 
or his imagination excited by some of those external objects 
which have such influence over him ; and his feelings subside, 
like the feelings of a child." Soon she became so closely knit 
to the Wordsworths (Mrs. Wordsworth loved her enthusiasti- 
cally) that — about the end of 1840 — she went to live at Rydal 
Mount ; and was an almost constant inmate for many years. 
" I would be content to be a servant in the house," she wrote, 
*' to hear his wisdom." Her presence was of especial value when 
Dora went away to be married, in 1841. Wordsworth dictated 
to Miss Fenwick those precious bibliographical notes, prefixed, 
in all good editions, to his poems. In such intimacy it was 
inevitable that a shrewd observer like Miss Fenwick should 
be critical of her hero ; and critical she was. She chafed 
sometimes under his self-esteem ; she thought some of his 
moods unworthy. But she was faithful unto death ; and much 
of the light and strength of the home-life at Rydal in that last 
decade came from her. She died in 185 1. 

The Laureateship, pressed, as we have seen, on Wordsworth's 
reluctance, set a seal to his public estimation. But the last 
years, 

" Placid in their going 
To a lingering motion bound," 

yet moving at times through dark waters, have that privacy, 
that domestic inwardness, which marked the whole of Words- 
worth's life. What he was, rather than what the world thought 
of him ; the light he gave rather than the rewards he received ; 
the sound of his voice without the reverberations of fame — these 
are what matter most in our estimate. From this point of view, 
his death was in perfect keeping with his life. In fulness of 
days, surrounded by the love and reverence of a perfect home, 
the strong man yielded without a struggle to the Power that 
was stronger than he. It was the spring of 1850; on April 7 
he would be eighty years old. On Sunday, March 10, he 
was at Rydal chapel for the last time. Spring winds bear 



AFTERGLOW 313 

hardly on the aged : on that very Sunday, he looked feeble in 
a cold walk to Grasmere with his sister-in-law and Edward 
Quillinan. For a day or two he went about still, calling on 
Mrs. Arnold, calling on Quillinan. But deadly shafts were 
flying ; and on March 14 he was pierced. He had sat too 
long the evening before, on a cottage bench near White-moss, 
looking at the sunset. Pleurisy came on ; and for more than a 
month he lay with ebbing life. His wife was with him, and his 
eldest son ; Quillinan was constant in love and care ; Dorothy, 
with clouded mind, was there to love him still. On April 23 — 
the day of Shakespeare's birth and death, as some have loved to 
note — as his cuckoo-clock was striking noon, he passed into the 
immortal. Some of his friends, looking on his dead face, were 
struck by its resemblance to Dante's, others by the look of his 
sister. Dorothy was being drawn about, as usual, in her chair. 
As she passed his door they heard her say, " O death, where is 
thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? " She survived him 
five years. 

The funeral was of the simplest and most private kind. 
Wordsworth had put on record his wish to be carried to the 
grave Westmorland-wise, on the shoulders of his humble 
neighbours, but this did not happen. The procession by the two 
lakes was of the ordinary kind. Grasmere church was filled, 
but not by the peasants, whom Wordsworth had so idealized. 
They never understood him. 

Mrs. Wordsworth was able to be there, supported by her two 
sons, her figure bowed by grief. Yet she did not faint, as they 
thought she might. She bore up calmly, and was able to appear 
among the mourners at Rydal Mount later in the day. Nine 
years after she was laid in the same grave. 

Many a pilgrim has visited, and will visit, the group of 
kindred graves near the east end of the church, the Rothay 
murmuring below. The one of chief interest is marked by the 
plainest of stones with the inscription, William Wordswortky 
1850 ; and below it, Mary Wordsworth, 1859. 

Such simplicity is more than an accident, or even a symbol. 
It is a vital part of the noblest genius ever devoted to showing 
the depth that underlies the common, the majesty that is in the 
humble. Wordsworth's life and poetry alike were without pomp 
and circumstance, and so is his grave. Towards the close of his 



314 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

life he said that his chief aspiration was to fulfil the beatitude, 
Blessed are the poor in spirit. If this is not the legend which we 
would add to his name, there is another of which none will 
dispute the fitness : Blessed are the peacemakers ; they shall be 
called children of God. 



CHAPTER XIV 
FAME 

WE have seen enough, in the course of our journey with 
Wordsworth, to show us in what various esteem his 
work was held during his lifetime, and how long he had to 
learn to win his soul in the patience of unpopularity. More 
than half a century after his death, we are in a position to 
make some estimate of the curves of his reputation, and to 
conjecture his ultimate place among English poets. 

On the whole, the history of Wordsworth's fame has been 
that of a steady advance from contempt to honour — honour 
which seems ever on the increase. But in his reputation in 
Britain alone the story has to take note of many phases and 
eddies. 

Lyrical Ballads was a challenge ; an enterprise conscious of 
its own novelty and daring ; and in Lyrical Ballads Words- 
worth was the predominant partner. In the minds of two 
young men who were to become considerable critics, in De 
Quincey and John Wilson, he found, as we have seen, immediate 
enthusiastic sympathy, though, in the case of Wilson, it was 
not the sympathy of unmixed approval. Still, it was disciple- 
ship ; the kind of appreciation which an innovator would give a 
great deal to win. It did not, however, represent accurately 
any large section of critical opinion about Wordsworth. 

During at least the first quarter of the nineteeth century, 
Wordsworth entirely failed to win popularity among the general 
poetry-reading and poetry-buying public. This was the more 
disappointing that in those days there was a relatively much 
larger poetry-reading public than there is in these, when novels 
and plays engage so much superficial literary interest. But at 
popularity of this kind Wordsworth did not aim, and he was 

315 



f^ 



316 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



not in the least embittered by the want of it. He knew that 
he could not compete in the market with the sumptuousness 
and glitter of his contemporaries, with the attractiveness of 
Scott and Byron and even of Southey ; and, though he thought 
amiss and too lowly of that rival work, he was justified in the 
serenity of his self-esteem, and his content to work for the 
future and the few. But, though the public was heedless, 
the narrower critical world was stirred from the outset, and 
three movements are distinguishable. 

First in time, and making most noise, came the stir of un- 
sympathetic criticism, typically represented by Jeffrey in the 
Edinburgh Review. It is a mistake to regard this criticism as 
wholly unfavourable, or to think of Jeffrey as stamping a 
clumsy and brutal heel on the fine flowers of romantic poetry. 
Jeffrey was an accomplished critic and a discriminating one ; 
his dealings with Scott, Byron, and Keats make it quite evident 
that he could appraise them nearly as well as his most " superior " 
successors ; his appreciation of the Elizabethans was as strong, 
if not as delicate and inward, as that of Charles Lamb. But he 
was essentially a critical pedagogue of the old-fashioned type ; 
he seemed to be half-scolding his charge even when he com- 
mended them, and when he conceived it to be his duty to 
punish, he showed little mercy. With the instincts of the 
schoolmaster he combined those of the partisan and the 
journalist ; he believed in the *' reality " of classes and " schools " 
as many mediaeval thinkers believed in the " reality " of general 
ideas ; and he knew that only opinions served up hot and strong 
avail to sell a periodical. He by no means denied all merit to 
Wordsworth, but he put Wordsworth into a " Lake School," 
and against that School he took sides ; against it he fought 
like a Trojan. He admitted, for example, that Lyrical Ballads 
"were deservedly popular" (only a hostile eye, by the way, 
could have detected their popularity) ; " they were undoubtedly 
characterized by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and 
natural feeling." In The Exairsion he found pathos, eloquence, 
tenderness, sweetness, and other good things. But he was con- 
vinced that the essential importance of Wordsworth lay in his 
supposed membership of the supposed Lake brotherhood, — a 
brotherhood of literary heretics and dissenters, partly of German 
and partly of Rousseau-ish origin ; a sect which the Editiburgh 



FAME 317 

was bound to suppress in the name of literary catholicity, ortho- 
doxy, and apostolical succession. 

In proceeding from this starting-point, Jeffrey's criticism of 
Wordsworth broke down. The start was a false one. Words- 
worth belonged to no brotherhood, no party ; even in the first 
issue of Lyrical Ballads he was working for his own hand ; 
with Coleridge he hardly co-operated. And though there are 
[interesting affinities between some of Rousseau's thought and 
some of Wordsworth's, it is absurd to maintain that Words- 
worth derived from Rousseau, or was in any sense a propagan- 
dist of his doctrines. Failing to understand Wordsworth's 
solitariness and originality, Jeffrey failed to understand him at 
all, and his blame and his praise were alike nearly worthless. 
By the time 1807 was reached, Wordsworth had published 
much which easily lent itself to smart journalistic ridicule, and 
helped to accumulate the discredit of the imaginary " Lakers." 
Jeffrey lived under the constant sense of a kind of conspiracy 
among the mountains : the new poets, he seemed to believe, 
haunted them like a nest of brigands. Tliey were affected ; 
they were exaggerated ; they were silly ; they were revolutionary ; 
and they hung together for the purpose of sowing affectation, 
exaggeration, silliness, and social discontent broadcast. 

Fortified by this theory, Jeffrey had an easy task with 
Wordsworth's poetry in detail. By this time he ought to have 
discovered that Wordsworth, whatever his faults, was not only 
a good poet, but a great one ; but he never made that discovery 
at all. He believed that in his simplicity Wordsworth was 
imitating Ambrose Philips ; and so it was obvious to call the 
lines to The Small Celandine "namby-pamby." As to Alice 
Fell: "if the printing of such trash be not felt as an insult to 
the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." He 
seemed to be stooping to uproot a noxious weed when, speaking 
of Resolution and Independence in words which, with an opposite 
innuendo, would be an excellent criticism, he defied " the bitterest 
enemy of Mr. Wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel 
from any collection of English poetry, or even from the 
specimens of his friend Mr. Southey." The Lake School were 
tedious and affected, and so was Yarrow Unvisited. The Lake 
School were always imitating somebody ; and in his sonnets 
Wordsworth was at his best, because in them he was imitating, 



318 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

not Quarles, Ambrose Philips, Cowper, Schiller, or Kotzebue, 
but Milton. 

But there was a deeper depth waiting for poor Jeffrey. One 
does not expect an eminent journalist to be constitutionally a 
philosopher ; and there never was less of a philosopher than the 
bright, trenchant Whig lawyer into whose hands Wordsworth 
fell. Jeffrey had an uncomfortable feeling from the beginning 
that Wordsworth's poetry was philosophic, and the feeling was 
much strengthened by The Excursion and The White Doe of 
Rylstone. The feeling took shape in the conclusion that Words- 
worth was, or pretended to be, a " mystic ; " it was one of the 
sins of the Lakers, learned from Germany, to darken with 
mysticism the clear British air. (At a later stage Carlyle gave 
Jeffrey much trouble by the same propensity.) Mysticism, 
therefore, must be got rid of thoroughly. It is perceptible in 
the Ode to Duty, and of that Ode we accordingly say, in our 
best style, that in it " the lofty view is very unsuccessfully 
attempted," and concerning two lines in particular — 

" Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient Heavens, through;thee, are fresh and strong" — 

that they " seem to be utterly without meaning ; at least, we 
have no sort of conception in what sense Duty can be said to 
keep the old skies /r^j/^, and the stars from wrong." The Ode 
on Intimations of Immortality has its venom so concentrated 
that it may be killed by one jingling phrase : "it is the most 
illegible and unintelligible part of the publication." 

In pursuing this method with The White Doe, Jeffrey had a 
leg to stand on. There is certainly mysticism in it, and it is 
mysticism which does leave the reader somewhat perplexed and 
unsatisfied. It is a little difficult, when one has finished it, to 
be sure what it is all about, and why things in it happen as they 
do. It is an ambitious and self-conscious poem. Wordsworth 
meant to do, and felt that he was doing, something specially 
remarkable in it ; and perhaps in proportion to this ambition 
and self-consciousness, it is not a complete success. But at 
least it is a beautiful poem ; beautiful in its melody and pathos ; 
beautiful in its suggestiveness and tender treatment of the tie 
between man and the humbler creatures. But Jeffrey saw 
nothing of the beauty ; it seemed to him " to consist of a happy 



FAME 319 

union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong 
to [Mr. Wordsworth's] school of poetry." In his best journalese 
the critic explained that when he first took it up he thought 
it was a parody, but that he had not gone far till he felt 
" intimately " that " nothing in the nature of a joke could 
be so insupportably dull." In Lyrical Ballads the poet was 
exhibited on the whole " in a vein of very pretty deliration ; " 
in The White Doe he appears " in a state of low and maudlin 
imbecility." And so on. Enough of this phase of Words- 
worthian criticism. 

Another phase is centrally represented by Hazlitt. We 
may perhaps label it superior critical approval, with the word 
"superior" in inverted commas. It stands midway between 
the unsympathetic and uncomprehending treatment of Jeffrey, 
and the enlightened critical sympathy which makes the third 
phase of the period. Like Jeffrey, Hazlitt loved to lecture the 
people he was criticizing ; he had much of Jeffrey's cocksureness 
and partisanship. Like Jeffrey, too, he was a journalist, and a 
yet more eminent one than Jeffrey ; after Defoe, Hazlitt is 
perhaps the most distinguished journalist, pure and simple, of 
pre- Victorian times. Like the journalism which Defoe did so 
much to found — that of Queen Anne's reign — the journalism of 
the teens of the nineteenth century was half literary and half 
political ; and Hazlitt, its most brilliant ornament, made ample 
use of the double inspiration. He was a liberal when Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Southey had become conservative, and 
this antagonism made his literary epigrams sting like whips. 
Nothing, certainly, in that kind could be better than some of 
Hazlitt's dicta. What more, for instance, could Coleridge's 
worst enemy desire for him than such treatment as this : " He 
is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the paradoxes 
of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind. He 
moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and false- 
hood, sense and nonsense, sophistry and commonplace, and only 
assents to any opinion when he knows that all the reasons are 
against it. A matter of fact is abhorrent to his nature ; the 
very air of truth repels him. He is only saved from the 
extremities of absurdity by combining them all in his own 
person. Two things are indispensable to him — to set out from 
no premises and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness 



320 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

of a single certainty would be an insupportable weight upon 
his mind." 

The hand that could thus castigate Coleridge, would not, we 
might expect, spare Wordsworth. Nor did it, when Hazlitt 
was playing the journalist rather than the literary critic proper. 
Here is Jeffrey's method reproduced in perfection. " The spirit 
of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism. We know an instance. It 
is of a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, 
on idiot boys, and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old 
huntsman. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and the anti- 
Jacobin politics of this writer is the same. His lyrical poetry 
was a cant of humanity about the commonest people, to level 
the great with the small ; and his political poetry is a cant of 
loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbe- 
cility. . . . This person admires nothing that is admirable, feels 
no interest in anything interesting, no grandeur in anything 
grand, no beauty in anything beautiful. He tolerates nothing 
but what he himself creates ; he sympathizes only with what 
can enter into no competition with him, ' with the bare earth 
and mountain bare, and grass in the green field.' He sees 
nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness, 
and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism is, in this 
respect, a madness ; for he scorns even the admiration of him- 
self, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he 
has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all 
science and all art ... he hates prose, he hates all poetry but 
his own." 

This bluster was political : Hazlitt was a Bonapartist 
liberal, and he was punishing Wordsworth, with any weapon 
which he thought would serve, for being a constitutionalist. 
But there was another Hazlitt — the literary critic ; and this 
Hazlitt was for Wordsworth, not against him. The man who 
wrote what has just been quoted, wrote less than two years 
later, " Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. . . . 
Of many of the Lyrical Ballads it is not possible to speak in 
terms of too high praise . . . they are of inconceivable beauty, 
of perfect originality and pathos. They open a finer and deeper 
vein of thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has 
done or attempted." Jeffrey would now and then fling a morsel 
of praise at Wordsworth ; but Hazlitt is here doing something 



FAME 321 

very different. This is sympathetic criticism ; and, for its 
immediate purpose, it is adequate. Hazlitt's sympathy with 
Wordsworth was incomplete, but it was genuine. He knew the 
poet's weaknesses ; but he knew also his strength and how 
mighty it was. He was not a philosopher ; but he made what 
is, after all, the central discovery about Wordsworth, namely, 
that he was. He describes Wordsworth's higher egoism, his 
self-projection into things, with some hardness of tone, but with 
true insight. Of Lyrical Ballads he says, " Fools have laughed 
at, wise men scarcely understand, them. He takes a subject or 
a story as pegs or loops \sic\ to hang thought and feeling on ; 
the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for 
imposing appearances ; the reflections are profound, according 
to the gravity and aspiring pretensions of his mind. . . . He 
has dwelt among pastoral scenes, till each object has become 
connected with a thousand feelings, a link in the chain of 
thought, a fibre of his own heart. . . . To the author of the 
Lyrical Ballads, nature is a kind of home ; and he may be said 
to take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image 
so insignificant that it has not, in some mood or other, found 
the way into his heart. . . . He has described all these objects 
in a way, and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had 
done before him, and has given a new view or aspect of 
nature. . . . Remote from the passions and events of the great 
world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal 
movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his own conscious 
reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds. . . . 
The tall rock lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit ; the 
cataract roars in the sound of his verse. . . . There is little 
mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry ; 
but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was 
written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its 
simplicity, its loftiness, and its depth." This, we feel, is the 
essential Wordsworth ; this is Wordsworth almost as Matthew 
Arnold understood him. 

Hazlitt, of course, wrote always as a contemporary critic, 
with no obligation to be reverent, and with an imperious 
obligation to be effective. He has said a great deal about The 
Excursion, with which, whether in its praise or its blame, little 
fault can be found. He is quite right, we feel, when he finds in 

Y 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

it a lack of constructive power proportionate to its pretensions 
and its length. He is quite right when he detects in it both 
flatness and insipidity. Yet we should feel debarred from 
saying of it, as he does, " The efifect was like being ushered into 
a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet in 
the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses 
of apple-dumplings served up." That is not the way to speak 
of a classic ; and Th& Excursion, with all its faults, is a classic. 

Thirdly, there is to be distinguished, alike from Jeffrey's^ 
scornful depreciation, and Hazlitt's somewhat patronizing 
approval, a body of cordially and intimately sympathetic 
criticism, which is centrally represented by Coleridge, and the 
later, soberer, " Christopher North." We have already found it 
in De Ouincey, in Charles Lamb, and in Southey. In that 
Quarterly article which was so pulled about by Gifford, but 
which remains as an authentic and official counter-manifesto to 
Jeffrey, Charles Lamb came to close quarters with T/te Excursion. 
In spite of the editor's mauling, Wordsworth might well have 
been grateful for the appreciation. For Lamb writes reverently 
as well as approvingly ; he has no scorn for The Excursion ; 
makes no apology for it. Even Despondency Corrected, the 
Elizabethan Lamb — sometimes so non-moral as to have no word 
of disapproval for Wycherley — singles out as the best part of the 
poem. And when, at the close, he deals with Wordsworth's 
unpopularity, he accounts for it, not by any faults, but by his 
boldness and originality, and by the blindness of readers to 
those grandeurs and simplicities of the world which were 
revealed to the poet. " It \The Excursion^ must indeed be 
approached with seriousness. . . . Those who hate the Paradise 
Lost will not love this poem. The steps of the great master are 
discernible in it ; not in direct imitation or injurious parody, but 
in the following of the spirit, in free homage and generous 
subjection." Greater praise there could hardly be. 

But the most systematic exposition of this kind of criticism 
was in Coleridge's Biographia Liter aria, published in 1817. 
This desultory book is one of the landmarks of romantic 
criticism. It reveals, in the light shed by an absolutely great 
critic, the inner workings of a literary movement in which he 
bore a chief part. The Wordsworthian criticism contained in 
it, however, has not all an equally absolute value. Part of it 



FAME 323 

is criticism, not of Wordsworth's poetry, but of his theories of 
poetry, imagination and fancy ; and with those theories Cole- 
ridge had uncomfortable personal entanglements. He collabo- 
rated with Wordsworth in the original Lyrical Ballads, and 
then he edged out of the collaboration. The theory of poetry 
which Lyrical Ballads exemplified was excogitated by the two 
men on the Nether Stowey road and among the Ouantocks ; 
but when Wordsworth published the full exposition of the theory 
in later issues, Coleridge did not find himself altogether in 
agreement with it. Much of Biographia Liter aria is occupied 
with dissent from Wordsworth's doctrines of imagination and 
poetic diction, and with a display of the inconsistencies between 
his theories and his practice. But at last the critic forgets 
controversy, and deals with the absolute value of Wordsworth's 
poetry as it was known in 1817. 

Coleridge's criticism from this point of view is very far from 
being all praise. He complains of Wordsworth's egotism as 
a limitation. He finds many faults and defects in his poetry, 
and he begins by stating them. And when he comes to 
praise, he uses an ascending climax, in which the highest 
comes last. We must therefore begin at the end if we would 
know where Coleridge " places " Wordsworth. He places him, 
he estimates his absolute rank, in the following sentences : 
"Lastly, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift 
of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. . . . 
In imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers 
to Shakespeare and Milton ; and yet in a kind perfectly 
unborrowed and his own." This is enough ; such an utterance 
from such a man, side by side with the judgments of Jeffrey 
and Hazlitt, makes the picture of early criticism all but com- 
plete. The rest, whether praise or dispraise, is, by comparison, 
detail. Yet it is important detail ; and we may glance at it. 

It is notable that Coleridge had the insight to praise highly 
Wordsworth's style : i.e., in particular, the careful appropriateness 
of his words, their " untranslatableness, in words of the same 
language without injury to the meaning." The value of this 
praise is heightened by Coleridge's consciousness of what he 
calls the "inconstancy" of Wordsworth's style, his frequent 
lapses in sentence or statement from the distinguished to the 
prosaic. There is no doubt that Wordsworth aimed at extreme 



324 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



^ 



verbal conscientiousness and precision ; and we must be grateful 
to Coleridge for hailing his success, and distinguishing it from 
those deficiencies in style which have bulked so large to many 
readers. And we must agree with him in finding in it, as he 
does, a moral as well as a literary element, an evidence of truth- 
fulness as well as of artistic skill. 
V Coleridge urges also the freshness and originality of Words- 

worth's thought ; his truth to Nature ; his deep pathos, born of 
human sympathy. The sympathy, he truly maintains, is that 
of a spectator rather than of a fellow-sufferer in the strict sense ; 
but perhaps, as art, it is none the less wonderful for that. " In 
this mild and philosophic pathos," says Coleridge, " Wordsworth 
seems to me without a compeer. Such he is ; so he zvrites." 
On the other side of the shield, as Coleridge saw it, there were 
Wordsworth's "inconstancy" and its derivatives ; his matter-of- 
factness, his prosaic detail, his frequent failure to produce 
imaginative fusion. Nor was Coleridge able to approve Words- 
worth's addiction to rural forms of low life, though his reason 
for disapproval was different from those of the scornful critics. 
He was ready with some reservations to admit the essential 
dignity of the humblest human being, and the equality, in 
certain respects, of all men ; but these were facts, he considered, 
for the moralist rather than the poet ; the poet's primary aim is 
aesthetic ; and it is somewhat morbid to derive poetic pleasure 
exclusively, or even chiefly, from the lowest rank of life, especially 
when, as in the case of the Wanderer in The Excursion, the senti- 
ments attributed to a pedlar would have been more relevant to 
some more dignified personage. 

Finally, Coleridge complained of an occasional want of the 
sense of proportion in Wordsworth ; of an approach at times to 
" mental bombast," the use of " thoughts and images too great 
for the subject." It is the curse of those in whom the sense of 
humour, involving the sense of proportion, is feebly developed. 

Not much later than Biographia Literavia, Blackwood took 
up the championship of Wordsworth with all the generous- 
hearted vigour of " Christopher North." Like Coleridge, and 
unlike both Jeffrey and Hazlitt, Wilson refused to adopt the 
" superior " attitude in criticizing. " For our own parts," he 
wrote, speaking for Maga, "we intend at all times to write of 
great living poets in the same spirit of love and reverence with 



FAME 325 

which it is natural to regard the dead and the sanctified ; and 
this is the only spirit in which a critic can write of his con- 
temporaries without frequent dogmatism, presumption, and 
injustice." Wilson could make a sly jest at Wordsworth's 
expense, but only over the cheering cup of an ambrosial night ; 
in his serious hours he kept the enthusiasm of his youth, and 
was ready to maintain that Wordsworth was one of the great 
poets of his age, one of the greatest poets of any age. He 
recognized the philosophy and ethical elevation of his poetry ; 
the " love, benignity, and ethereal purity " which made him a 
unique interpreter of Nature. He considered him all but 
absolutely original in two respects : as a revealer of the more 
hidden and "silent" laws of the universe; and as a revealer 
of the higher and more " beautiful," because gentler, phases of 
human nature. In both respects he seemed to Wilson other 
than characteristically English ; his philosophy, in its contem- 
plative quietude, was " Indian " rather than British ; his studies 
in humanity were far away from the tastes which find poetry 
only in characters like Richard the Third, Milton's Satan, or 
the Giaour. Wilson cordially admitted Wordsworth's Miltonic 
rank ; and, in some respects, was disposed to put him above 
Milton. His sonnets, he thought, were finer than Milton's ; and 
" the openings into immutable brightness and harmony " which 
it was given to Wordsworth sometimes to reveal, were diviner 
than any sublimities of terror, tumult, or discord. There was, in 
short, an eternal value in Wordsworth's poetry which must 
ensure its immortality. It was "impossible, in the very nature 
of things, that he ever could be eclipsed." 

Writing in the 'twenties, Wilson was able to recognize that 
the tide had turned ; that Wordsworth's influence was already 
great and was waxing. He found Wordsworth in Scott, 
Coleridge, Southey, Crabbe, even in Byron. "The two last 
cantos of Childe Harold . . . are in many places absolutely 
written, it may be said, by Wordsworth. He it was that taught 
Byron how to look on a mountain, and how to listen to a 
cataract or the sea." That may have been so ; but it was 
Byron's lasting vogue and the wide appeal of the sentimentalism 
borrowed from him by lesser versifiers, which was the chief bar 
to Wordsworth's popularity. Those who were leaving Byron 
behind did not turn to Wordsworth, but occupied themselves 



326 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

with "L. E. L." and Mrs. Hemans until Tennyson was ready 
for them. 

But great powers were on Wordsworth's side, and his hour 
had come. In the end of the 'twenties there was a great stir 
in the national life, and that stir helped Wordsworth. With 
the usual irony of things, the Liberalism which he so feared 
and hated helped to bring men to his feet. If the Romantic 
Revival was over, it was over only as summer is over when it 
passes into autumn. It was gathering in some of the many 
fruits of its harvest, and in that enrichment Wordsworth was 
made rich. Poetry like his, founded in revolution, permeated 
by philosophy, and maintaining, with serene inflexibility, the 
indefeasible dignity of essential human nature, could not be 
ahen to an age of new ventures in thought and faith, an age 
eager to begin an assault on privilege. The newer Liberalism 
was too young to think of Wordsworth as a lost leader ; in so 
far as Liberalism means thought as opposed to habit, there was 
much in Wordsworth to nourish Liberalism, and, on the other 
hand, the higher Conservatism which arose in opposition to 
Liberalism, the Conservatism which idealized the past, and 
found a voice in The Christian Year and the Oxford Tracts, 
might, if it would, claim Wordsworth's direct support. 

It was in 1839 that Wordsworth's general fame was 
announced by the Oxford Doctorate ; and it was in the course 
of the 'thirties that he was quietly winning the posts from which 
his forces never have been, and never will be, dislodged. He 
had a great ally in his old University. Byron was still power- 
ful at Cambridge ; but, among the younger and abler men there, 
there was a band of keen Wordsworthians who pitted their 
leader against Byron. The disciples of Coleridge, who were 
many at Cambridge, were, of course, readers and admirers of 
Wordsworth. What was practically a new cult was eagerly 
adopted by men like Monckton Milnes, John Sterling, and some 
others. Nothing could be more significant of Wordsworth's 
widening power than John Stuart Mill's testimony. Mill, 
though he had Cambridge friends, was not a Cambridge man. 
He was educated by his father, trained in utilitarian radicalism 
and agnosticism for utilitarian radicalism and agnosticism. 
In 1826 he passed through one of the crises to which thoughtful 
men are subject ; his creed failed him, his power of hoping and 



FAME 327 

acting seemed to die. In 1828 he first read Wordsworth ; and 
life, faith, and hope came back. Mill did not cease to be an 
agnostic and a utilitarian; but he became, through Wordsworth's 
agency, a new man. He was no Wordsworthian ; he thought 
there were greater living poets than Wordsworth ; nay, he 
thought him "the poet of unpoetical natures." But all the 
greater on this account was, he believed, his healing power. 
Mightier poets might soar too high, and dazzle instead of 
comfort. Wordsworth, by his contemplative tranquillity, taught 
the art of lasting happiness. 

Mill remained a Benthamite after he came to admire 
Wordsworth. Frederick Maurice upheld Wordsworth against 
Utilitarianism at Cambridge ; but he never whole-heartedly 
cared for him ; he thought him too egoistic to be a great spiritual 
teacher. Henry Taylor's was a powerful voice for Wordsworth 
at this juncture. In 1834 and 1841 respectively, he wrote in the 
Quarterly essays on Wordsworth's poetry in general, and on his 
sonnets in particular. Taylor noted the strong turn of the tide in 
Wordsworth's favour during the ten years before 1834. He 
himself, though no blind partisan, had no hesitation in hailing 
Wordsworth as the greatest poet and philosopher of his age. 
Primarily he thought him a poet : he was a philosophic writer 
only "in the sense in which any man must be so who writes 
from the impulses of a capacious and powerful mind, habituated 
to observe, to analyze, and to generalize." His philosophy was 
his own ; and could be understood only by those in sympathy 
with him as a poet. Taylor grasped the central fact that 
Wordsworth's subject was man ; but man " never divested of 
his relations to external nature. Man is the text ; but there is 
always a running commentary of external phenomena." 

Wordsworth, Taylor thought, was sometimes artificial in his 
simplicity, and so gave the enemy occasion to blaspheme ; and, 
in such poems as The Idiot Boy, he attempted an impossible 
amalgam of " the trivial and the grave, the imaginative and the 
familiar." Yet his habitual sincerity was one of the sources of 
his strongest power, and another was the accuracy of his know- 
ledge founded on sympathy. Nor had he anything to be ashamed 
of in his style. Speaking of Beggars, Taylor dwells on " the 
consummate art with which it is constructed ; the free vigour of 
the ' liquid lapse ' of the verse ; the care which is taken that there 



328 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

shall be no prominences, nothing which shall arrest attention 
and exact admiration for parts to the injury of the rest." 

For Wordsworth's intellectual powers in general, Taylor had 
the highest admiration ; he would not have been misplaced in 
any situation ; he was in possession of " a complete mind." 

Yet in the fame which Wordsworth reaped in the last twenty 
years of his life, his power as a spiritual teacher was the chief 
factor. His most appreciative readers in his old age did not 
think of comparing him with Byron ; they were not concerned 
either to condemn or defend the novelties with which he fluttered 
critical dovecots half a century before. Great seriousness, great 
conscientiousness was abroad ; there was much individual heart- 
searching ; great variety in social effort ; much intensity of 
divergent religious thought. Wordsworth, standing outside all 
this, was to a large extent the poet of it. He was resorted to 
as a philosopher, a reconciler, able to grant Nature's own peace 
to tired effort and wounded hearts. The Cceleste himen of which 
Keble spoke in his Creweian oration was the light of his poetry 
to the most discerning in those days. It was, as the same 
grateful reader wrote five years later, because Wordsworth, 
whatever was his theme, raised men's minds " to holier things " 
that he was loved and honoured, 

Frederick Robertson of Brighton, a man of the keenest 
sensibilities, religious and literary, spoke words about Words- 
worth in 1853 which are significant as to this phase of his 
reputation. He told an audience of working-men that for years 
he had tried to make Wordsworth's principles the guiding prin- 
ciples of his own inner life. He proceeded : " The general 
opinion about Wordsworth is exceedingly superficial. To the 
mass of the public all that is known of him is a conception 
something like this : They have heard of an old man who lived 
somewhere in the Lake District, who raved considerably of Lake 
scenery, who wrote a large number of small poems, all of them 
innocent, many of them puerile and much laughed at, at the 
time they appeared, by clever men ; that they were lashed in 
the Reviews, and annihilated by Lord Byron." 

Robertson's own high estimate of Wordsworth was very 
largely ethical. " The work he did, and I say it in all reverence, 
was the work which the Baptist did when he came to the 
pleasure-laden citizens of Jerusalem to work a reformation ; it 



FAME 329 

was the work which Milton tried to do, when he raised that 
clear, calm voice of his to call back his countrymen to simpler 
manners and simpler laws." 

Plainly, then, even at the date of his death, when he had 
been seven years Poet Laureate by universal acclamation, 
Wordsworth was not a popular poet. The echoes of the 
mocking laughter which greeted his early appearances had not 
quite died away. The mantle of mere popularity had passed 
from Byron, first to the minor sentimentalists, and then straight 
to Tennyson, who, during the whole of Wordsworth's laureate- 
ship, and in the years immediately following his death, interested 
the poetry-reading public much more keenly than Wordsworth 
did. Yet a thoughtful critic, now little heeded, who was too 
soon lost to English letters, George Brimley, the librarian of 
Trinity College, Cambridge, estimating Wordsworth in 1851, 
wrote thus : " William Wordsworth is generally allowed to have 
exercised a deeper and more permanent influence upon the 
literature and modes of thinking of our age, than any of the 
great poets who lived and wrote during the first quarter of 
the present century." And that influence, we may be sure, was 
mainly philosophical, mainly ethical, and it fell in an age which 
needed it. 

" He, too, upon a wintry clime 
Had fallen — on this iron time 
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. 
He found us when the age had bound 
Our souls in its benumbing round." 

Every age, probably, thinks its round benumbing, but certainly 
doubt and fear are far from Wordsworth ; and it must be a fatal 
numbness which does not disappear under his touch. 

More than half a century has passed since Wordsworth died, 
and during that time criticism of the best kind has been doing 
its slow and steady work on his reputation. We may take note 
of some of that work, and estimate its general result. 

In anticipation, we may perhaps say that the general result 
has been to define Wordsworth's greatness, and to merge his 
philosophical and ethical in his aesthetic and literary value. His 
greatness was assured before the close of his life ; as to that 
criticism had decided with Coleridge and Wilson against Jeffrey 
and the scorners. But it remained to estimate and analyze it ; 



330 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

it remained, in particular, to show it as poetic greatness, and not 
as merely ethical and didactic profitableness. The "doubts, 
disputes, distractions, fears " of the mid-century tended to make 
Wordsworth seem mainly a teacher. If he is to stand as a great 
poet, he must be shown as an artist primarily giving " pleasure," 
and only secondarily as doing good. 

Skilful and reverent hands have been at work on the task. 
Wordsworth, as Matthew Arnold said, " has brought luck to his 
critics " ; they have praised him so well, and so worthily enhanced 
their critical reputation by his means. Perhaps the first of the 
band to deserve mention is John Campbell Shairp, the Scottish 
Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1877 and 1887, a fine 
critic, and, in spirit and tendency, one of the most Wordsworthian 
of poets. Shairp, born in 18 19, was old enough to remember 
vividly various ups and downs of Wordsworth's reputation ; 
he could remember his rivalry with Byronism ; his advance to 
the fulness of fame in which he died. He was acutely conscious 
also of a reaction which followed his death — a reaction which it 
would, perhaps, be more accurate to speak of as an eclipse. 
For in the 'fifties and 'sixties Tennyson loomed so large, and 
attracted so swiftly and so widely, that his predecessor in the 
laurel was inevitably obscured. Moreover, these were years 
when Browning was in his slow and remote ascendant, influencing 
selecter spirits whom Wordsworth might have satisfied. Such 
obscuration was really in Wordsworth's favour ; he never has 
been, he never will be, popular as Tennyson and even Browning 
have been popular ; and the preoccupation of poetry-readers 
with them has enabled him to take his place quietly among the 
classics. But to Shairp the neglect of Wordsworth seemed an 
evil si^n, an indication of an "excitement-craving, unmedita- 
tive age." 

Nothing, in any case, could have been better than the way 
in which the critic framed his apologia. He at once seized and 
kept the right point of view from which to estimate Wordsworth ; 
he showed him, neither as an eccentric experimenter in poetic 
style, nor as an ethical teacher, but as a great imaginative poet, 
a revealer of that inner truth of things, which is their beautiful 
significance for poetry. Such a passage as the following showed 
what was a new insight into Wordsworth when it was written, 
an insight without which a true criticism of him cannot be 



FAME 331 

attempted. " There are many now in middle life, who look 
back to the time of their boyhood or early youth, when Words- 
worth first found them, as a marked era in their existence. 
They can recall, it may be, the very place and the hour, when, 
as they read this or that poem of his, a new light, as from 
heaven, dawned suddenly within them. The scales of custom 
dropped from their eyes, and they beheld all nature with a 
splendour upon it, as of the world's first morning. The common 
sights and sounds of earth became other than they were. The 
heart leapt up to the white cirrhi clouds, and looked on the 
early stars of evening with a young wonder, not felt before. 
Man, too, and human life, cleared of the highway dust, came 
home to them more intimately, more engagingly, more solemnly, 
than before. For their hearts were touched by the poet's 
creative finger, and new springs of thought, tenderer wells of 
feeling, broke from beneath the surface. And though time and 
custom may have done much to dim the eye and choke the 
feelings which Wordsworth once unsealed, no time can ever 
efface the remembrance of that first unveiling, nor destroy the 
grateful conviction that to him they owe a delicate and inward 
service, such as no other poet has equally rendered." 

In this " delicate and inward " utterance, put forth as a modest 
record of personal experience, Shairp inaugurated worthily the 
latest and best Wordsworthian criticism. For what he had 
found in Wordsworth was imagination, imagination of so high 
a quality and so original in its manifestation as to entitle him 
who exercised it to a place among great poets. Shairp was 
intensely religious, and exceedingly sensitive to the ethical sides 
of things ; but he would have nothing to do with such a mis- 
reading of Wordsworth as would make him primarily a religious 
or ethical poet. For Shairp he was primarily a man of imagina- 
tion, though he might not have so phrased it ; a " vital soul." 
" The vital soul," he wrote, " it is a great gift, which, if ever it 
dwelt in man, dwelt in Wordsworth. Not the intellect merely, 
nor the heart, nor the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any 
of these alone, but all of them condensed into one, and moving 
all together. In virtue of this vital soul, whatever he did see 
he saw to the very core. He did not fumble with the outside or 
the accidents of the thing, but his eye went at once to the quick 
— rested on the essential life of it. He saw what was there, but 



332 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

had escaped all other eyes. He did not import into the out- 
ward world transient fancies or feelings of his own, ' the pathetic 
fallacy,' as it has been named ; but he saw it, as it exists in 
itself, or perhaps rather as it exists in its permanent moral 
relations to the human spirit." Could the action of imagination 
be better described or in more general terms ? Here, indeed, is 
the common platform on which all the great artists stand. This 
is their power, their prerogative ; here is at once their starting- 
point and their goal. Sir Leslie Stephen, early in the 'seventies, 
devoted one of his most thoughtful essays to Wordsworth. The 
title of the essay, " Wordsworth's Ethics," is significant of the 
critic's point of view, though it hardly defines the scope of 
the criticism. Stephen firmly grasps Wordsworth as a philoso- 
pher ; and he admires him as a moral teacher. But his essay is 
mainly concerned to show the essential identity, or, at all events, 
the harmonious co-operation, of poetry and philosophy, in the 
explanation of the world and the guidance of conduct. Unlike 
Sir Henry Taylor, Stephen found, and rejoiced to find, a system 
of thought, or at least materials lending themselves to system, 
in Wordsworth. " Wordsworth's poetry," Stephen wrote, " speaks 
to our strongest feelings because his speculation rests upon our 
deepest thoughts. . . . His psychology, stated systematically, is 
rational ; and, when expressed passionately, turns into poetry." 
Matthew Arnold, who was Shairp's contemporary and friend, 
did much for Wordsworthian criticism, though not as much as 
he might have done. For, in spite of early personal association 
with Wordsworth, in spite of keen insight and considerable 
breadth of view, his temperament was antagonistic to Words- 
worth's, and he did not understand or appreciate him as well as 
he thought he did. While he fully realized Wordsworth's great- 
ness and his right to a very high place in England's poetic 
hierarchy, and while he realized that it was his poetry, and not 
his mere morality, that set him there, he spoiled his estimate by 
pooh-poohing his philosophy. He was led to do this emphatically 
by Leslie Stephen's criticism referred to above. He put Words- 
worth's poetry and philosophy in antithesis to one another : tJie 
poetry, he said, was reality, the pJiilosophy ilhision. He took the 
popular view of Wordsworth's inequality ; he held that the trans- 
cendent merit which he found in him belonged only to a fraction 
of his work, a fraction from which The Prelude and The 



FAME 333 

Excursion were excluded. But to treat Wordsworth's poetry 
thus is to subject it to an indignity, it is to mangle it into 
dishonour. Wordsworth is, indeed, strangely unequal ; didac- 
ticism in him again and again breaks bounds ; truth wearies 
instead of delighting with its beauty ; inspiration rubs shoulders 
with what looks very like platitude. But, for all that, if 
Wordsworth's philosophy is illusion, his poetry is not worth 
much. If it is a disservice to him to reprint The Excursion and 
The Prelude, Jeffrey's estimate was not, after all, so wide of the 
mark. For, when all due admission has been made for Words- 
worth's inequalities and lapses, his work remains a unity, and 
must be shown, must be accepted or rejected, as such. So much 
he claimed for it ; so much must be granted him. If it is refused 
him, justice will not be satisfied by allowing to some of his 
poetry that it has an admirable " criticism of life," or " natural 
magic." If Shairp's words are not true : that " the vital soul 
. . . dwelt in Wordsworth ; not the intellect merely, nor the 
heart, nor the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any of these 
alone, but all of them condensed into one, and moving all 
together ; " and if the totality of Wordsworth's poetry is not the 
evidence of their truth, it is difficult to see how Wordsworth can 
ultimately stand near Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley ; how 
he can be a great poet. 

Richard William Church, sometime Dean of St. Paul's, was 
an eminent critic of Wordsworth, who did not make Matthew 
Arnold's mistake. Belonging in the main to Keble's school of 
religious thought, Church felt no agnostic repulsion to Words- 
worth's " sober certainties," to his sense of the reality of the 
Unseen, to his ever-recurring ethical emphasis, to the perfect 
terms on which he kept with religious ideas and phraseology. 
Whatever, therefore, he might say about Wordsworth, he was 
quite certain not to call his philosophy " illusion." On the con- 
trary, he does not scruple to say, " Wordsworth was, first and 
foremost, a philosophical thinker." Nay, Dean Church came 
very near to praising him for didacticism. He fixed on a saying 
of Wordsworth's about himself, and gave it an interpretation of 
his own. " Every great poet," Wordsworth said once, *' is a 
teacher ; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as 
nothing." Church conceives him to have meant not that he was 
in any sense unpoetic or unimaginative, but that he exercised 



334 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

his poetic and imaginative powers under a sense of practical 
responsibility such as one cannot attribute to many other great 
poets on an equality with, or surpassing, him. But Dean Church 
never forgets that his work was poetry ; and must be tried by 
the canons of poetry, i.e. primarily by intellectual and aesthetic 
canons. He finds in the first Lyrical Ballads alone " force and 
originality of thought, vividness and richness of imagination, 
command over the instrument of language, in its purity, its 
beauty, and its majesty." He freely accepts Wordsworth's own 
estimate of his innovations in poetry ; he believes that the lowli- 
ness of his themes and diction was the result of imaginative 
insight, not of affected puerility. The "inflexible loyalty of 
truth" which he defines as "the prime condition of all his 
writings " was loyalty to truth which " could only be reached by 
thought and imagination." In this critic's estimate, Words- 
worth's harvest of truth, gathered in by width and depth of 
imagination, supplemented the gifts of Shakespeare and Milton, 
and was contributed to by such writers as Thackeray, Dickens, 
and George Eliot Nor, with such an estimate, does Dean 
Church's sympathy with Wordsworth's high morality blind him 
to his literary limitations and defects. He finds in him an 
egotism which lowers him ; a narrowness which neutralizes, 
hinders his insight ; a pompousness which spoils his style. 
And he finally identifies himself with Coleridge's reverent and 
undazzled appraisement. 

Mr. Stopford Brooke, who has done so much towards the 
better understanding of English poetry, has done much towards 
the better understanding of Wordsworth. More, perhaps, than 
any other critic, he has realized what in him may be called 
mystical, its reality and its importance. The quasi-personality 
which Wordsworth found in Nature, the unity of thought which 
he attributed to it, Mr. Stopford Brooke takes seriously, and 
shows as the poet's central discovery. He points out that his 
view of Nature as pervaded by one living soul, though it has 
affinities with the view of some Italian Neo-Platonists of the 
Renaissance, was quite new in English poetry. He was " the 
first who loved Nature with a personal love." 

The remainder of the criticism which deserves notice is 
significant. For it proceeds from men who, from one cause 
or another, are detached from moral prejudice and religious 



FAME 835 

prepossession ; many of whom are not ill disposed to toy with 
the notion of " art for art's sake," and all of whom are well 
aware that verse is not made poetry by being enlisted on the 
side of religion and virtue. 

Mr. Swinburne has praised Wordsworth highly at the expense 
of Byron, and criticized him chiefly in opposition to Matthew 
Arnold, so his estimate is too heavily seasoned with controversy 
to live as a great appreciation. Yet the genuine homage, which 
he makes no attempt to disguise or restrain, paid by him to a 
poet in all respects so heterogeneous as Wordsworth, is an 
important sign of the times. 

The late Mr. Frederick Myers gave us, in his monograph on 
the poet, an excellent study of Wordsworth, based on the 
approving acceptance, in his main, of his philosophy of Nature, 
his general conception of poetry, and his imaginative treatment 
of humanity. As regards the last point, Myers reached a 
generalization in advance, perhaps, of anything hitherto asserted 
in Wordsworth's praise. " We may almost venture ... to assert 
that no writer since Shakespeare has left us so true a picture of 
the British nation." One wonders what Jeffrey, Hazlitt, or, for 
that matter, Coleridge, would have said to such a dictum. 

Almost simultaneously with Myers, Sir John Seeley, in his 
Natural Religion, linked Wordsworth with Goethe — superficially 
his acute literary antagonist — as one of the two great poets 
who expounded and exhibited the ideal natural religion, the 
devotion and worship which may be paid to the Universe, con- 
ceived as a unity or system of inter-relations. 

Mr. John Morley's admiration is less loftily pitched. His 
estimate involves something of a return to the ethical respect 
and gratitude of the mid-nineteenth century. Wordsworth's 
primary claim on this critic's attention is, one can plainly see, 
his teaching ; the process of ethical simplification and purifica- 
tion — what was best in Rousseau with none of what was bad — 
which was wrought by the austere revolutionary-conservative 
enthusiast of Grasmere and Rydal. When he comes to a 
purely literary estimate, he falls back on the time-honoured 
antithesis between Wordsworth inspired and Wordsworth un- 
inspired, and is disposed to place him as mere poet, not only 
much below the greatest classics, but considerably below some 
of his great contemporaries. Yet it is significant that he does 



336 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

not ultimately yield to the temptation. His last word is that 
Wordsworth probably will stand below Shakespeare, Milton, 
and Dante, but that he cannot be sure. After all literary 
deductions have been conscientiously made, what remains 
seems so great that the critic must account for it. He does so 
by fixing once more on the ethical in Wordsworth, on his 
" direct appeal to will and conduct " as that which places him 
"on a line just short of the greatest of all time." This moral 
appeal, Mr. Morley holds, is made poetically ; it is no system in 
verse ; it stands or falls with no religious or metaphorical pre- 
possession ; it reaches us, often through a fanciful, sometimes 
through a false, medium. All the same, it is the appeal of 
sincerity ; it proceeds from truthfulness, from one who saw and 
knew things — many things, at least — with his own eyes and to 
the bottom. So he was able to " bring the infinite into common 
life," and, by doing so, " to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify." 

From our point of view, the most important contribution to 
Wordsworthian criticism is the latest, the careful study of Pro- 
fessor Walter Raleigh. For here at last we get as complete 
detachment as we can hope for ; here is no party-manifesto ; 
no halting between ethical approval and literary fault-finding ; 
this is the first genuine twentieth-century reaction to Words- 
worth's influence. The wheel has come full circle ; and Words- 
worth is avenged of all his adversaries. 

Professor Raleigh is no " Wordsworthian " ; he is as con- 
scious of Wordsworth's shortcomings as of his successes ; but 
he knows that, taken for all in all, and as he is, he is a great 
poet, whom it is the business of true criticism to expound on 
the assumption of his originality, not to judge according to 
Aristotelian or other canons. " Criticism," he tells us, " must 
. . . follow the poet, if he gives any token of being worth the 
following, step by step, recreating his experiences, hanging on 
his words, disciplining itself to the measure of his paces, 
believing in him and living with him." And Professor Raleigh 
ties himself to his own rescript ; he enters into Wordsworth 
with reverence and sympathy, not so much either praising or 
blaming him, as showing his method and analyzing his results. 
He takes him quite seriously throughout, in his dealings with 
Nature and in his dealings with Man, believing in the genuine- 
ness, the reality, of what Wordsworth found in them. So 



FAME 337 

strongly, indeed, does Professor Raleigh believe in the reality 
of those Wordsworthian assertions which many readers have 
shaken their heads over as "mystic," and which even Mr. 
Morley smiles at as mere play of fancy, that it is perhaps his 
greatest discovery that Wordsworth wrote in a "spirit of 
science." There is a great deal to make the superficial student 
of Wordsworth think otherwise ; he seems to have a quarrel 
with science, to regard it as "murdering to dissect," as seeing 
things "in disconnection dull and spiritless." But Professor 
Raleigh is impressed by Wordsworth's famous saying that 
" Poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the counte- 
nance of all Science " ; and he concerns himself to show that 
the truth of the saying can be proved out of Wordsworth's own 
work. Wordsworth's whole-hearted delight in Nature, the 
sober cheerfulness of his hopes for the race, the profound awe 
with which he came back from his visits to the " mind of Man," 
were quite untainted with that distaste for reality which both 
religion and art have often felt ; Wordsworth faced reality fully 
with no impulse either to flee or to falsify ; and this. Professor 
Raleigh reminds us, is the characteristic attitude of science. 
Poetry smiles in the eyes of science ; beauty is begotten of 
truth. 

Wordsworth, in Professor Raleigh's estimate, was, before all 
things, a seer : in his vision itself, and its inherent power, not in 
any morals drawn from it by the poet, lies the moral force 
which it is impossible not to feel in Wordsworth. It is thus that 
Wordsworth is a teacher without being, in his best work, 
didactic ; that he is philosophic without forfeiting poetry. And 
he is not only a seer, but an adventurous explorer ; his imagi- 
nation often led him into places beyond which there is no foot- 
hold. It is in such situations that he comes nearest to failure. 
He pressed onward to a point where speech fails and drops into 
silence, where thought is baffled and turns back upon its own 
footsteps. When we read him aright, we accompany him on his 
great expeditions ; and are braced by sharing his honourable 
retreats. "To know him is to learn courage ; to walk with him 
is to feel the visitings of a larger, purer air, and the peace of an 
unfathomable sky." 

And so, at the end of our consorting with Wordsworth, 
seeing him among his friends and fellow-workers, trying to 
z 



S38 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

realize him in his habit as he lived, and to read the features of 
his genius, not only in his own writings, but in those answering 
minds which have felt him most acutely, we bear away, it may 
be hoped, a true image. We see him set free, after long 
bondage, from the shackles of comparison, and the pitiful tyranny 
of mockers and scorners. It does not interest us to assert or 
deny his inferiority to other poets, any more than it would to 
assert or deny the inferiority of the beauty of spring to the 
beauty of autumn, of the pageantry of dawn to the pageantry 
of sunset. Why should we insult the great brotherhood of song 
by vulgar reasonings as to which shall be greatest ? Enough 
for us that in that brotherhood Wordsworth has an undisputed 
place. Let us compare him — and the more the better — with 
Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Burns, Shelley, or whom we will, 
that we may, if possible, determine what is his special contri- 
bution to the riches of the human spirit. But let us not misread 
the lesson of his unconquerable solitariness, his serene egoism, 
his austere isolation. They were the result neither of his great- 
ness nor of his littleness, but of his individuality. It fell to him 
to do — imperfectly, it may be, and at times almost repellently — 
a peculiar work for poetry, to exercise a daring contemplative 
and penetrative imagination in an age of many revolutions, with 
the modern spirit developing at great proportionate speed. It 
was work which could be done only in a beautiful and remote 
place, sparsely peopled with simple folk. The literar>' excite- 
ments of London, the stimulation of foreign scenery and races, 
the convivialities and sensualities from the midst of which some 
other poets have somehow learned to deliver their message, 
would have made Wordsworth's message impossible. He had 
many friends, and was always glad to see them ; but his teachers 
and intimate companions could be none other than the stars 
and the hills and the waters, and those human beings, at once 
common and rare, who seemed to share their elemental life. 

It is Wordsworth's great triumph that he has at last per- 
suaded us to take him substantially at his own estimate, and 
precisely as he was. Early critics thought him much of an 
impostor ; whatever we may think of him, we shall never again 
think that. The world which we find in his poetry may not be 
the whole world, but it is the real world ; revealed to imagina- 
tion and reproduced by art such as only great poets possess. 



FAME 339 

And Wordsworth's narrowness, his petulant and ungracious 
exclusions, do not, we now see, avail to hinder his ever active 
sense of the Universal. The simple people and homely scenes 
with which his verse concerns itself are chosen not for their 
simplicity and homeliness, but for the transcendent majesty and 
awful beauty, the melting pathos or terrifying tragedy, which 
his imagination found in them, and of which his poetry 
convinces us. Wordsworth knew the world differently from 
Shakespeare ; but it was the same world, and he knew it, in 
one sense, as well. And the depths discovered by both poets 
are equally unfathomable. Therefore, it is, we are sure that 
Wordsworth is immortal. Men will find something fresh in 
him, something vitally relevant, in all ages. 

We do not vex ourselves so much with that lack of unity, 
of homogeneity in Wordsworth's poetry which used to be 
such a stumbling-block. Whether by sifting, or by Increased 
tolerance, we have enough to provide us with unity of im- 
pression and estimate. Wordsworth is not only great ; he is 
also one. The image no longer seems of mingled gold and 
clay. There is clay, no doubt ; but it does not deform as it 
used to do, and it does not trouble us. 

Nor do we now fall on Wordsworth, as our fathers did, for 
sacrificing beauty to truth, beauty that delights, to truth that 
edifies. If he could be proved guilty of this charge, his claim 
to be a great poet could not be sustained. Even poets like 
Dryden and Pope do not live as poets by the common sense 
which was their truth, but by the metrical skill and wit which 
were their substitutes for beauty. Wordsworth had no such 
substitutes to fall back upon ; nor did he need them. He 
reached and rendered the beautiful. His was the quest on 
which all great poets are more or less consciously bound, the 
quest for the unity of the Beautiful and the True ; and we are 
sure now that he did not return baffled. We know that he had 
a fresh and original vision, and we can share it. He saw very 
deep into the life of things, and in its depth is its beauty. 
Hence his serenity, his optimism, his cheerful faifh. His genius 
had a transfiguring touch, not, as we used to think, a dulling 
one. He used the artist's loftiest power when he chose the 
weak things of the world to confound the things that were 
mighty, when he showed what less enlightened eyesight had 



340 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

taken for a wilderness to be blossoming as the rose. Nature 
and Man ; the poet has essentially no other theme. Yet each 
poet has his own message about them, his own chosen point of 
view from which he regards them. Wordsworth's point of view 
was that of the artist who is also a philosopher and a prophet, 
in some sense a priest. Rightly understood, he can never seem 
alien, either from the religious, or from those who stop short of 
religion. The themes of his verse, the sights and sounds, the 
things and the persons and thoughts that engage him, are 
grounded on the most positive and reasonable reality. And 
yet we see on them the stamp which men set on the foreheads 
of angels ; and the service for which he marshals them is 
Divine. 



APPENDIX 

REFERENCES 
of some of the principal passages quoted in the text — 

Page 1 1. Many were the thotcghts, etc. Prelude, Bk. i., 70-74. 

„ 18. To place himself, etc. Guide to the Lakes (Frowde, 1906), 22-24. 

„ 20. Many are the notes, etc. Excursion, Bk. ii., 696-723. 

„ 21. A step, etc. lb. ii., 829-876. 

„ 25. Thozt look'st upon me, etc. Address from the Spirit of Cocker- 

mouth Castle. Sonnet of 1833. 

„ 28. The sighs which Matthew, etc. Matthew. 

„ 28. The eye — it cannot, etc. The Tables Ttirned. 

„ 31. There was a Boy, €10.. The poem is so called. PsXso Prelude, v., 

364. 
„ 32. While on the perilous, etc. Prelude, i. 336-339. 
„ 32. Far above, etc. lb. i., 371, 372. 
J, 33. IVisdom and Spirit, etc. lb. i., 401-414. Also as separate poem 

called " Influence of Natural Objects in Calling forth and 

Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth." 
» 33- Q/t amid, etc. lb. i., 581-588. 
„ 35. Those hallowed, etc. lb. i., 551-558. 
„ 35. For the discerning, etc. From The Recluse. 
„ 36. Gentle agitations, etc. lb. Prelude, 298-301. 
„ 36. An ajixiliar light, etc. lb. ii., 368-376. 
„ 36. The snow-white church, etc. lb. iv., 21, 22. 
j> 37- When first I made, tXc. lb. iv., 137-152. 
„ 37. ''Mid a throng, €lc. lb. iv., 309-319. 
„ 38. To the brim, etc. 333-337« 
„ 45. I cannot paint, eXc. Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern 

Abbey. 



342 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Page 46. March firmly, €tc. Prelude, x., ^ii-$8g. 
„ 50. I saw her, etc. '•'' She was a phantom of delight^'' 
„ 51. She whispered still, &\.z. Prelude, xi., 2,^i)-2,^j. 
„ 51. But for thee, tic. lb. xiv., 247-256. 
„ 53. For the Man who, etc. JSxcursioft, iv., i2oS-i22g. 
» 53- ^he Being, etc. lb. iv., 1264-1274. 
„ 65. / heard, etc. Lines written in Early Spring. 
„ 66. Nay, traveller, rest ! etc. Lines left upon a seat in a yew-tree. 
„ 73. Thus fear relaxed, etc. Prelude, xiv., 282-301. 
„ T^. That summer, tic. lb. xiv., 395-413. 

„ 82. I mourned with thousands, tic. At the Grave of Btfrns, iZo'i. 
„ 120. A plague, tic. Written in Germany. 
„ 121. I kissed his cheek, tic. Address to the Scholars of the Village 

School of . 

,, 124. O there is blessing, etc. Prelude, i. 1-3. 

„ 124. To the open fields, etc. lb. i. 50-54. 

„ 126. A narrow girdle, tic. Poems on the Naming of Places. No. 4. 

„ 127. As beautiful to thought, etc. The Recluse. 

„ 128. On Natures invitation, etc. lb. 

„ 132. On me, etc. The Sparrow's Nest. 

„ 132. While I am lying, etc. To the Cuckoo. 

„ 133. Would'' st thou be happy, etc. The Redbreast chasing the 

Butterfly. 
„ 134. Sent forth such sallies, etc. Poems on the Naming of Places. 

No. I. 
„ 134. The Eminence, etc. lb. No. 3. 

„ 135. A cloistral place, tic. Poems on the Naming of Places. No. 6. 
„ 142. Never su?i on living creature, etc. Stanzas written in my Pocket 

Copy of ThomsotHs Castle of Indoletice. 
„ 148. In the choir, etc. Coleridge : To a Gentleman; beginning, 

" Friend of the Wise ! and Teacher of the Good ! " 
„ 149. Of thee, etc. Prelude, xiv., 276, etc. 
„ 1 50. To fill, etc. The Recluse. 
„ 153. He had felt, tic. Excursion, i., igi-2iS. 
„ 155. " Ah/ why," tic. lb. ix., 36-47. 

„ 159. In the shady grove, tic. Poems on the Naming of Places. No. 6. 
„ 163. Here did we stop, etc. Elegiac Verses in Memory of my brother, 

John Wordsworth. 
„ 171. She came, no more, etc. Prelude, xiv., 268-274. 
„ 172. ^Tis a fruitless task, etc. To a Painter; beginning, "All praise 

the Hkeness by thy skill portrayed." 
„ 173. O, my Beloved, etc. On the Same Subject. 



APPENDIX 343 

Page 238. He wrote three poems. The second of the three, from which the 
verses on p. 239 are quoted, was written many years after 
the visit to Dumfries, though/^//, Wordsworth tells us, at the 
time. 

„ 268. / have felt, etc. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern 
Abbey. 

„ 269. How exqjiisitely, etc. The Recluse. 

„ 277. Great God! etc. Sonnet beginning, " The world is too much 
with us." 

„ 29S. The Antechapel, etc. Prelude, iii., 60-63. 



INDEX 



Abbotsford, 246, 247 
Addison, Joseph, 48 
Alfoxden — 

Description of, 65, 66, 67, 242 

Cottle's visit to, 79 

Coleridge's visits to, 65-91 

Thelwall's visits to, 68, 90 

Wordsworth at, 65-91, 124, 142, 165 
Dorothy's influence, 129, 139, 141 
Incidents in life recorded in poetry 

of that time, 68, 91 
Recollections of, in Germany, 120, 
123 
Allan Bank — 

De Quincey at, 204-205 

North at, 252 

Wordsworth at, 189-194, 203-207 
Alfred, King, 39 
Ambleside, centre of Lake district, 19, 

20, 23, 25, 126 ; Coleridge's family at, 

199 ; Quillinan at, 293 ; Hartley 

Coleridge schoolmaster at, 296 ; H. 

Martineau settled at, 298 ; otherwise 

mentioned, 125, 141, 143, 202, 254, 

300, 301, 306 
America, " Pantisocratic " plan of emi- 
gration to, 42-43 
Amiens, Peace of, 183-187 
Anderson, Dr., 284 
Apennines, 248 
Armathwaite, 47 
Arnold, Matthew, criticism by, of Shelley, 

269, 270 ; of Wordsworth, 332-333 ; 

view opposed by Swinburne, 335 ; 

knowledge of Wordsworth, 321 ; at 



Oxford, 290 ; on Wordsworth's critics, 

330 
Arnold, Dr. Thomas, home of, 291, 298 ; 

Wordsworth's intimacy with, 306, 307 ; 

death of, 307 ; otherwise mentioned, 

12, 126 
Arnold, Mrs. Thomas, 313 
Arrochar, 237 
Ashburner, Thomas, 140 
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 157 
Askrigg, 128 
Atkinson, 309 
Awe, Loch, 239 



B 



Baillie, Joanna, 305 

Bartholomew, John, 66 

Barton Fell, 136 

Bassenthwaite, 23 

Bath, 40, 43 

Beaumont, Lady, Wordsworth's letters 
to, 2, 157 

Beaumont, Sir 'George, presents Apple- 
thwaite to Wordsworth, 157 ; founder 
of National Gallery, 158 ; Words- 
worth's letter to, 161 ; death of, 158 ; 
otherwise mentioned, 165, 286 

Belle Isle, Windermere, 293 

Birmingham, Lloyd at, 58, 59> IS7 

Blackwood, William, 255 

Blake, 4, 82 

Blakesware, 59, 60 

Blea Tarn, "Solitary's" cottage near, 
20 

Blencathara, 23, 24 ; Lamb and Mary at, 
222 



346 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 

Byron, Lord — continued 



Bolton, Colonel, 256, 257 

Bootle, 174, 17s 

Borrowdale, 19, 23 

Boswell's son with Wordsworth, 115 

Bowles, Caroline (Mrs. Southey), 116 

Bowles, Rev. W. Lisle, 94 

Brathay, 22 

Bridgnorth, 199 

Bridgwater, description of, 39 ; other- 
wise mentioned, 55, 198, 217 

Brimley, George, 329 

Bristol, Burke member for, 41 ; capital 
of West, 40, 41 ; Coleridge at, 42, 43, 
54, 55. 56, 208 ; Cottle's home, 41 ; 
Humphry Davy at, 156; De Quincey 
at, 198, 199, 203, 204 ; Southey at, 41, 
42, 43, 54, 56 ; Thehvall's birthplace, 
67 ; Wordsworth at, with Dorothy, 55, 
91 ; otherwise mentioned, 44, 217 

Brompton, 170 

Brooke, Stopford, on "Dove Cottage," 
131 ; Wordsworth's critic, 334 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 290 

Browning, Robert, 15, 147, 166, 178, 
289, 290, 330 

rBryder, Miss, 293 
Bunsen, 289 
Burke, Edmund, 40, 41 
Burnett, Robert, 43, 56 
Burns, Robert — 
Death of, 82 

Gray, Shenstone, and Thomson, admi- 
ration for, 82 
Lamb's estimate of, 94 
Wordsworth's love for, 10 ; tribute to, 

82, 83 ; estimate of, 10, 238, 239 
Otherwise mentioned, 4, 82, 83, 136 
Buttermere, 19, 24, 222 
Byron, Lord — 

Estimates of — by Lamb, 258 ; by 
Jeffrey, 316; by North, 325; by 
Swinburne, 335 
Fame of, 289 

Greece, sympathy with, 262 
Literary connections of — 
Coleridge, with, 144 
' ' Lake " school, condemnation of, 

96,97 
Scott, criticism of, 93 
Southey, attack on, 97 ; jealousy of, 

"3 
Wordsworth, satirical treatment of, 



^ 



10 ; criticism of, 258 ; accused of 
plagiarism by, 261 ; comparison 
with, 261, 262 ; no comparison in 
later years, 328 
Orientalism of, lio 
Poetry of — 

Character of, 261, 263 
Popularity of, 108, 316, 326, 329 
Romanticism of, 6, 93 ; his attack on 

Romanticism, 93 
Style of, 261-263 
Otherwise mentioned, 4, 278 



Calais, 170, 186, 222 

Calvert, Raisley, visited by Wordsworth, 
47, 50 ; death of, and bequest to 
Wordsworth, 48, 49 

Calvert, William, 47, 50 

Cambridge — 

Brimley, George, at Trinity, 329 
Byron's popularity at, 326 
Coleridge at, 42, 43, 60, 326 
Wordsworth — at St. John's, 17, 26, 
44, 46, 213 ; his nephew Master of 
Trinity, 24 ; his friends, 48, 49 ; 
honours, 289 

Camoens, 185, 293 

Canning, George, 256, 257 

Cardiganshire, 80 

Carlisle, 135, 232, 238 

Carlyle, Thomas, description of Southey 
by, 99-105 ; on Coleridge's weakness, 
144; wedding journey of, 170; 
description of Mrs. Wordsworth by, 
1 72 J sympathy of, with revolutionary 
ideas, 301 ; description of Wordsworth 
by, 303-305 ; meeting with him, 302- 

304 
Carlyle, Mrs., 102 
Cartmell, 46 
Champion, Richard, 41 
Chatterton, Thomas, 36, 136 
Chaucer, 197, 259 
Christ's Hospital, 59 
Church, Dean, 333, 334 
Cintra — 

Convention of, 190 — Wordsworth's 
horror at, 191 j his pamphlet on, 
195, 204 

Southey at, 50 



INDEX 



347 



Clarkson, friend of Wordsworth, 156, 
157 ; opponent of slave trade, 156 ; 
description of Mrs. Wordsworth by, 
1 73 ; caters for Lamb and Mary at 
Dove Cottage, 223 
Clarkson, Mrs., 156, 157, 223 
Clevedon, 50 
Clovenford, 240 
Cocker, 24 
Cockermouth, 23, 24, 46, 125 ; " nest " 

in garden at, 1 32 
Coker, 19 
Coleorton, 157, 244 

Coleridge, Derwent, birth of, 142 ; child- 
hood at Greta Hall, 105 ; visit to 
Wordsworth, 199 ; with Wordsworth 
at Hartley's death, 297 
Coleridge, Hartley, birth of, 54 ; child- 
hood at Nether Stowey, 55 ; at Greta 
Hall, 105 ; visits Wordsworth, 199, 
29s ; Wordsworth's love for, 295-298 ; 
career of, 296, 297 ; death of, 297 ; 
H. Martineau's opinion of, 298 
Coleridge, Sir John Taylor, 291 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — 
Ancestry of, 42 

Appearance of, 42, 100 ; described by 
Dorothy Wordsworth, 55 ; by De 
Quincey, 198 
Career of — birth, 42; at Christ's 
Hospital, 59 ; at Cambridge (Jesus 
College), 42, 43, 326 ; enlists, 42 ; 
visits Southey at Oxford, 42 ; Welsh 
tour, 42 ; at Bristol — plans emigra- 
tion scheme, 42, 43, 46 ; engagement, 
43, 60 ; walks in Somerset, 43, 56 ; 
takes degree at Cambridge, 43 ; in 
London, 43 ; marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; 
at Clevedon, 50 ; at Redcliffe, 54- 
55 ; plans " Watchman," 54 ; birth 
of Hartley, 54 ; visit to Racedown, 
55) 58 ; at Nether Stowey, 55-91 ; 
visit to Alfoxden, 67-91 ; " Ancient 
Mariner " published in " Lyrical 
Ballads," 73, 77-81, 91 ; at Ham- 
burg, 91, 119; at Ratzeburg and 
Gottingen, 11 9- 124; at the Lakes, 
125 ; at Greta Hall, 11, 23, 142 ; in 
Malta, 198 ; separation from his wife, 
204 ; at Highgate, 208 ; Scotch tour 
with Wordsworth and Dorothy, 237 ; 
at Fox How, 291-292 J death of, 208 



Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — continued 
Characteristics of — 

Affection, 58, 62, 143, 145 
Critical faculty, 176, 177, 334 
Despondency, 145, 148, 237 
Irresolution and vagrancy, 142-I45, 

237 

Irresponsibility and neglect of home 
duties, 65, 105, 142-145, 204 
Criticisms by — of Wordsworth, 3, 183, 

219, 322-324, 329, 335 ; of Lamb, 

64, 65 ; of Southey, 98 
Estimates of— by Wordsworth, 9, 10, 

233> 235, 258, 263 ; by Lamb, 61 ; 

by Carlyle, 144 ; by De Quincey, 

198, 213 ; by Blacktvood's Magazine, 

255 
Family of, 65, 105, 142-145, 199, 204, 

291, 295-298 
Literary connections and friendships 
with — 

Beaumont, Sir George, 157 

Blackwood, 255, 272 

Byron, 144 

Carlyle, 144 

Cottle, 41, 79 

Davy, Humphry, 156 

De Quincey, 198, 199-203 

Lamb, 60, 66, 94, 217, 218, 222- 
223 

Lloyd, Charles, 58, 157 

North, 252 

Poole, Thomas, 56-58 

Southey, 42, 54, 56, 60, 92, 94, 98 ; 
decline of friendship, 54, 114 

Thelwall, 90 

Wordsworth, 54-55, 91-92, 114, 125, 
133, 141-149. 233, 248, 297, 325, 
326 ; joint work with " Lyrical 
Ballads," 7, 76-91. 93f 142, 219, 
317 ; first line of " We are Seven," 
8; plan of "Ancient Mariner," 

77 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 66, 70-76, 
91, 141-145 
Politics of, 42, 56, 68, 90, 319 
Publications of — 

" Biographia Literaria," 272 
"Christabel," 79, 144, 145 
"Lyrical Ballads," 67, 76-91, 142, 
219 
Religion of, 44, 54, 57 



348 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — co7itinued 
Reputation of, 9, 10, 94, 233, 235, 

258 
Style of — inferior to Dorothy Words- 
worth, 72 ; as nature painter, 64, 
145-147 ; unequal in versification, 
144 ; great imaginative powers, 147 

Coleridge, Sarah (Sarah Fricker), engage- 
ment of, 43 ; marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; at 
Greta Hall, 199, 200, 201, 203 ; receives 
De Quincey, 203 ; visits Wordsworth, 
I43j ^99 ; neglected by her husband, 
60, 142, 143, 145 ; jealousy of Dorothy, 
145 ; separated from her husband, 204 ; 
deserted, 114, 208 

Coleridge, Sara, childhood of, at Greta 
Hall, 105, 114 ; with de Quincey, 199 ; 
visit to Wordsworth, 200 

Colston, Edward, 40 

Congreve, William, 6 

Coniston, 18, 143, 197 

Coniston Fells and Water, 20, 26 

Cookson, Anne (Wordsworth's mother), 
24 

Cookson, Canon, 46, 90 

Cottle, Joseph, 41, 43, 79 

Cowley, Abraham, 219 

Cowper, William, 3, 105 ; scorned by 
Wordsworth, 8 ; Wordsworth's sup- 
posed imitation of, 318 

Crabb Robinson, Henry, 225, 305, 311 ; 
Dorothy Wordsworth's letter to, 231 ; 
Wordsworth criticized by, 289, 305, 
316, 325 

Crabbe, George, 289 

Crackanthorp of Newbiggen Hall, 24 

Crewkerne, 49 

Crosthwaite, Southey's grave at, 92, 104, 
116 

Crummock-water, 19 

Cumberland, 11, 19, 20, 64 



D 



Dampier, 216 

Dante, sonnets of, 185 ; Wordsworth 

compared with, 313, 336 
Darwin, Charles, 204 
Davy, Humphry, 156, 243 
Davy, Dr. John, 309 



Dawson, Eliza (Mrs. Fletcher), 298- 

309 
De Quincey, Thomas — 
Career of — birth in Manchester, 195 ; 
at Manchester Grammar School, 
195 ; in Wales, Bath and London, 
195 ; at Oxford, 195, 197 ; tour in 
Lake District, 197 ; at Nether 
Stowey, 198, 199 ; first meeting with 
Wordsworth, 200 ; at Dove Cottage, 
130, 131, 203 ; at Allan Bank, 204- 
205 ; tenant of Dove Cottage, 205- 
213 ; marriage and home life, 206- 
207 ; at Middle Temple, 207 ; inter- 
view with North about Blackwood's 
Magazine, 207 ; publication of 
" Confessions of an Opium-Eater," 
207 ; editor of Westmoreland 
Gazette, 211 ; family removal from 
Dove Cottage to Edinburgh, 211- 
212 
Characteristics of — 
Affection, 206 
Desultoriness in work, 197 
Emotionalism, 200, 209 
Irregularity in habits, 208, 210 
Opium habit, 207 
Shyness, 209, 211 
Waywardness, 195 
Criticisms by, of — 
Coleridge, 200 
Fielding, 213 
Keats, 212 
Le Sage, 213 
Smollett, 213 
Southey, 203, 213 

Wordsworth, 183, 200 ; enthusiastic 
admiration, 196, 197, 250, 315, 
322 ; later estimation, 213, 214- 
216 ; on his fame, 12, 17 ; on 
" The Excursion," 21$ 
Literary connections and friendships 
with — 
Coleridge, 198, 203 
North, 252, 253 
Southey, loo ; decline of friendship, 

114 
Wordsworth, 198, 200-204, 282 ; in 
Wordsworth's circle, 195, 219, 
300; decline of friendship, 208- 
211 
Wordsworth, Mrs., 173, 200 



INDEX 



349 



De Quincey, Thomas — continued 

Literary connections with — continued 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 200, 202-204, 
209, 211 
Publications of — 

" Confessions of an English Opium 

Eater," 207, 211 

" Recollections," 213 

Style of, 4, 93, 19s, 200 

De Quincey, Margaret, 206, 207, 211, 212 

Defoe, Daniel, 319 

Derwent, the, 19, 23, 24, 104; Words- 
worth's childhood near, 25, 139 ; his 
love for, 23 ; romance of Cockermouth, 
27 

Derwentwater, 11, 23, 126, 145, 222 

Devon, 50 

Dewey, Orville, 14 

Dickens, Charles, 334 

Dorset, 17, 39, 40; Wordsworth and 
Dorothy in, 49-55; "Margaret's" 
story heard in, 54 

Douglas, Lord, 240 

Dove Cottage, description of, 180, 189 ; 
De Quincey's life at, 204-212 ; Charles 
and Mary Lamb at, in Wordsworth's 
absence, 223 ; Scott's visit to, 243 ; 
Wordsworth at, 128-174, 184, 189 

Dryburgh, 241 

Dryden, John, 5, 8, 175, 176, 259 

Duddon, River, 18, 22, 287 

Dumfries, 238, 295 

Dunmail Raise, 22, 134 

Dunsink, 299 

E 

Easedale, 22, 134, 309, 310 

Edinburgh, de Quincey in, 207, 211, 212 ; 

Christopher North's life in, 249-257 ; 

Wordsworth's and Dorothy's visit to, 

239 
Edmonton, 231 
Eildon Hills, 247 
Eldon, Lord, 152 
Eliot, George, 334 
Elleray, 256, 257 
Ellisland, 238 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 301, 302 
Enfield, 231 
Ennerdale, 18 
Esk, 18 



Esthwaite, 265 boating scene at, 32; 

influence of, on Wordsworth's love of 

nature, 27, 28, 34, 36, 125 
Exmoor, 39 



Fairfax, Edward, 202 

Fairfield, association of, with Wordsworth, 
22, 125, 163, 248, 279, 307 

Farringford, 294 

Fenwick, Isabella, connection of Henry 
Taylor, 102, 311 ; visits Carlyle, 102- 
103 ; intimate with Southey, 102-103 ; 
with Wordsworth, 310, 311 ; influence 
over Taylor, 31 1 ; letter to Taylor on 
Wordsworth, 312 ; at Rydal Mount, 
312 ; death of, 312 

Ferniehurst, 242 

Fielding, 213 

Flatholm, 39 

Fletcher, Archibald, 309 

Fletcher, Mrs. (Eliza Dawson), at Lanc- 
rigg> 298-309 ; her impressions of 
Wordsworth, 309 

Fletcher, Margaret, 309-31 1 

Fletcher, Mary. See Richardson, Lady 

Forncett, 46 

Fox, Charles James, Wordsworth's 
"Hymn" on, 15; his admiration for, 
134, 135 ; his introduction to, by 
Rogers, 295 

Fox How, Dr. T. Arnold's home, 12, 
298 ; Wordsworth's intimacy with, 306, 
307 ; J. T. Coleridge's visit to, 291 ; 
Julius Hare's visit to, 299 

France, 17, 42, 190; influence of, on 
Wordsworth, 14, 15, 45. 46, 90. 183, 
187, 193, 301 ' 303 ; liis visit to, 44, 
46,186; account of, in "Prelude," 153 
{See also Calais) 

Fricker, Edith. See Southey, Mrs. 

Fricker, Mary, engaged to Lovell, 43 

Fricker, Sarah. See Coleridge, Sarah 

G 

Gallow Hill, 170 

Galloway Hills, 82 

Garsdale, 171 

Germany, Coleridge's visit to, 91, 156 ; 
visit wasted, 142 ; Wordsworth's like- 
ness to contemporary metaphysical 



350 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



poets of, 34 ; desire for independence 
for, 193 ; Wordsworth's visit to, 91, 
I 18-124, 189 
Gibbon, Edward, 41 
Gillies, Margaret, 172 
Gladstone, William Ewart, 204 
Glaramara, 23 
Glasgow, 250 
Glastonbury Tor, 67 
Glen Croe, 238 
Gloucester, 199 

Goethe, greater works of, 1 18 ; views of, 
on Scott as novelist, 99 ; Klopstock's 
opinion of, 1 19 ; Landor's opinion as 
to Wordsworth's jealousy of, 305 ; 
Wordsworth linked with, by Seeley, 
33S ; his attitude towards, 120, 305 ; 
death of, 82 
Goldsmith, 3 
Goodrich, 45, 80 

Goslar, Wordsworth's visit to, 1 19-124; 
Dorothy's influence at, 129; "Prelude" 
begun at, 149 
Gottingen, 119, 124 
Grange, 45 
Grasmere — 

Coleridge's wife at, 204 ; his son's 

grave at, 297 
De Quincey at, 204, 252; his description 

of, 197 
Dorothy's influence at, 129; her journal 

regarding, 139 
Fair at, 143 

Lamb and Maiy at, 221-223 
Situation of, 127 
Vale of, 126-128 
View from, 23 

Wordsworth's life at, II, 92, 128-175, 
207, 208, 279, 313 ; his work at, 
139; his children's death at, 175, 
280 ; his political interests at, 183 ; 
settling at Allan Bank, 203 ; his 
meeting with Rogers, 295 ; his 
funeral, 313 
Otherwise mentioned, 19, 22, 153, 154, 
170, 199, 226, 263 
Graves, R. P., 299 

Gray, 9, 259, 278 ; Burns's admiration of, 
82 ; Wordsworth's view of, 7, 8, 82 ; 
Wordsworth compared with, 338 
Great Gavel, 1 8 
Greece, 262 



Greenhead Ghyll, 134 

Greta Hall, 157, 256, 257 ; Southey's 
home at, 104 ; Coleridge's life at, 104, 
142-145 ; Coleridge and Southey at, 
1 1 ; Mrs. Coleridge alone at, 204 ; 
Coleridge family at, 199 ; visits to, by 
Southey, 92, 1 14 ; Humphry Davy, 
156 ; De Quincey, 202 ; Charles and 
Mary Lamb, 222 

Grisdale Tarn, 163, 166 

Grosvenor, Southey's letter to, 106 



H 



Halifax, 46, 121 

Hamburg, 91, 118, II9 

Hamilton, William Rowan, Words- 
worth's friendship with, 298, 299, 300 ; 
his letter to, on Landor, 305 ; his visit 
to, 299 

Hamilton, Miss, 299 

Hammer Scar, 134, 198, I99 

Hare, Julius, 299 

Hawes, 171 

Haweswater, 19 

Hawick, 243 

Hawkshead, Wordsworth at school at, 
26-36, 125; his vacations at, 36-38; 
dance near, 37; his writings of, at 
Goslar, 121, 124 

Hawthornden, 240 

Harz Mountains, 119, 122 

Playdon (painter), friend of Wordsworth 
and Keats, 272, 273, 274 ; dinner to 
Wordsworth given by, 272-277 

Hayti, 189 

Hazlitt, William, as critic, 176, 319, 
324 ; as lover of books, 177 ; as critic 
of Wordsworth, 183, 214, 319-322, 
335 ; disapproves of Southey as court 
official, 113 

Helm, the, 134 

Helmsley, 171 

Helvellyn, 19, 22, 125, 142, 163, 248 

Hemans, Mrs. Felicia, 12, 326 

Highgate, 208, 232 

Hogg, James, poems of, 249 ; associations 
with Wordsworth, 284 ; Wordsworth's 
poem on the death of, 294 

Holford, 65, 66 



INDEX 



351 



Homer, 109 

Hutchinson, Joanna, 243 

Hutchinson, Mary. See Wordsworth, 

Mrs. 
Hutchinson, Sarah, 284, 291 



Inversnaid, 239 

Italy, Wordsworth's tour in, 248 



J 



Jedburgh, 241, 242 

Jeffrey, Francis — as critic, 11, 81, 93, 
98, 221, 244, 316-319 ; connection 
with Edinburgh RroiriV, 255, 316 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel — as critic, 7, 8, 
^75> 176 ; as journalist, 47, 48 



K 



Kant, Immanuel, 1 19-120 

Katrine, Loch, 239 

Keats, John — estimate of, by De Quin- 
cey, 212; by Wordsworth, 212, 271 ; 
by Jeffrey, 316; publication of "En- 
dymion,"272 ; criticism by, of Milton, 
275 ; intercourse with Wordsworth, 
271-275 J as Romanticist, 271-277 

Keble, John, 285, 286, 289 

Kendal, 171, 191 

Keswick, 12, 23, 47 

Kilchurn Castle, 239 

Kirby, 171 

Kirkstone Pass, 22 

Klopstock, 119 



Laidlaw, Willie, 246-247 
Lakes, the, associated with — 

Coleridge, Hartley, 296 

De Quincey, 196, 204-212 

Hamilton, 299 

Keats, 275 

Lamb, Charles and Mary, 221-223 

North, Christopher, 252 

Scott, 243, 244, 256 



Lamb, Charles — 

Career of — birth, 59 ; childhood in 
Hertfordshire, 60, 230 ; at Christ's 
Hospital, 59, 230 ; at Nether Stowey, 
62-66, 217 ; domestic tragedy, 217 ; 
later life with Mary in London, at 
Margate, Oxford, Edmonton, En- 
field, 224, 230-231 ; death, 230, 

233 

Criticisms by, of — 

Bowles, 94 

Burns, 94 

Byron, 258 

Coleridge, 61 

Cowper, 94 

Keats, 258 

Milton, 94 

Shelley, 258 

Southey, 94, 95 ; orientalism, 1 10 

Wordsworth, 81, 94, 224 ; compared 
with Shakespeare, 225 ; not wholly 
admiring, 220 
Estimates of, by — 

Coleridge, 64-65 

Wordsworth, 219, 226 ; appreciation 
of " Elia," 232 ; after death, 233- 

235 
Family of, 59, 60 

Literary friendships and connections 
with — 
Clarksons, the, 223 
Coleridge, 60-62, 219, 222; letters 

to, 60-62, 94 
Haydon, 272, 274 
Keats, 272-274 
Lloyd, 76 

Monkhouse, 272-274 
Southey, 114 
Wordsworth, 62, 217, 218, 219- 

228, 231 ; letter to, 232 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 219-228, 
231 
Publications of — 

" Essays of Elia," 229 
" Tales from Shakespeare," 224 
Style of — as critic, 61, 176, 220, 221, 
223, 225, 231, 316; as poet, 93, 
217; as letter-writer, 105, 228, 
232 ; as humorist, 217 ; as essayist, 
230-232 ; compared with North, 
256 
Lamb, John, 59, 61 



352 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Lamb, Mary — in London, 60 ; insanity 
of, 61, 218, 224, 233 ; tour with Charles 
in the Lakes, 222 ; intimacy with 
Dorothy Wordsworth, 222, 223 ; col- 
laboration in " Tales from Shake- 
speare," 224 ; congenial companion to 
Charles, 225, 230; Wordsworth's 
tribute to, 234 

Lancashire, li, 20, 26 

Lancrigg, 298, 309 

Landor, Walter Savage, 114, 212, 304- 

305 
Langdale, 18 

Langdale Pikes, "lusty twins" of "Ex- 
cursion," 20, 21, 22; scenery of, 26, 

287 
Langside, 25 
Lasswade, 239, 240 
Laud, Archbishop, 286 
Le Sage (Alain-Rene), 213 
Leigh Hunt, 183, 274 
Lessing, 1 1 8, 119 
Liddesdiile, 243 
Lincoln, 24 
Liverpool, 40 
Liverpool, Lord, 152, 262 
Lloyd, Charles, 58, 59, 76, 157 
Llyswen, 67 

Lockhart, John Gibson, 247, 256-257 
Lomond, Loch, 237, 239 
London, as associated with — 

Coleridge, Hartley, 296 

Coleridge, S. T., 60, 203 ; lectures, 
199, 204 

Davy, 156 

De Quincey, 203, 209, 211 ; seeing 
"Convention of Cintra" through 
the Press, 204 ; reading for the Bar, 
207 

Lamb, 66, 228, 23 1 

Scott, 244 

Wordsworth, 17, 44, 49, 188, 223, 
228, 229, 244, 272, 289, 306, 311 ; 
"Prelude" account, 153; meeting 
with Carlyle, 302, 303, 304 ; last 
meeting with John, 160 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 93 
Lonsdale, Lord — Wordsworth's father 

agent to, 24 ; makes Wordsworth 

Commissioner of Stamps, 280 ; sonnet 

to, 282 



M 



Macaulay, T. B., 99, 107 

Malta, Coleridge in, 198 
Manchester, 40, 103, 195, 196 
Margate, 230 

Martineau, Harriet, Wordsworth's neigh- 
bour at Ambleside, 12, 298, 308-309; 
mutual dislike, 297, 307 ; on Hartley 
Coleridge, 297, 298 
Mathews, James, 48 
Maurice, F, D., 327 
Melrose, 241 

Mill, John Stuart, appreciation of Words- 
worth by, 326, 327 
Milnes, Monckton, 56, 326 
Milton, John — 

Classical style of, I, 278 
Criticisms of, by — 
Arnold, Dr., 306 
Coleridge, 74, 78 
De Quincey, 197 
Jeffrey, 318 
Lamb, 94 
Landor, 212 
Morley, 336 

Wordsworth, 78, 182, 286 
Southey compared with, 97, 109 
Wordsworth's appreciation of, 184, 
185 ; his resemblance to, in appear- 
ance, 201 ; Wordsworth compared 
with, 278; by Southey, 115; by 
Keats, 275 ; by North, 325 ; by 
Morley, 330 
Otherwise mentioned, 9, 182, 259- 
261, 278, 329, 334 
Minto Crags, 243 
Monkhouse, 272-274 
Monmouth, Duke of, 39 
Montague, Basil, 49 
Montague, Basil (son), 80 ; in Dorothy's 

charge, 49, 50, 66 
Moore, Thomas, no, 289 
More, Hannah, 41 
Morecombe, 18, 20 
Morley, John, as Wordsworth's critic, 

326, 327, 355 
Moxon, 233 
Mull, 239 
Murray, John, 253 
Myers, Frederick, 120, 335 



INDEX 



353 



N 

Nab Scar, 125, 205, 279 
Nab Cottage, 206 
Naples, 248 

Napoleon — Wordsworth's dislike of, 15, 
187, 190, 320 ; loss of faith in, 183, 
184 ; sonnet on, 185, 186 
Nelson, Lord, 227 ; SouLhey's Life of, 
107 ; Wordsworth's ideal of "Happy 
Warrior," 167 
Newark Castle, 247 
Newman, Cardinal, 99 
Newton, Isaac, 272 

Nether Stowey, home of Coleridge, 55, 
62, 68-91, 142; of the Pooles, 56, 
57; scenery at, 64-91 ; described by 
Coleridge, 64 ; visited by Wordsworth 
and Dorothy, 55, 58, 59, 66, 142 ; by 
Lamb, 59, 62-66, 217-218, 267 ; by 
De Quincey, 198; "Lyrical Ballads" 
planned at, 323 
Nithsdale, 238 

North, Christopher (John Wilson)— 
Appearance of, described by De 

Quincey, 253 
Career of, 249-257 

Criticism',by, of Wordsworth, 196, 322, 
324-326, 329; enthusiastic, but 
discerning, 196, 250, 315 
Literary connections and friendships 
with — 
Blackwood, 256-257 
Canning, 257 
De Quincey, 253 
Scott, 256, 257 
Southey, 257 
Style — as essayist, compared with 
Wordsworth's, 249-257 ; with 
Lamb's, 256 ; as humourist, 256 



Ossian, 6-9 
Oxford, 60, 310 
Balliol College, Southey at, 41, 42, 

194 
Magdalen College, North at, 250, 252 
Oriel College, Hartley Coleridge at, 

296 ; Poole, John, fellow of, 56 
Visits to, by Coleridge, 56 ; by Lamb, 
2 A 



Ox ford — continued 

230 ; by Wordsworth, for degree, 
289 
Worcester College, De Quincey at, 197, 



Parret, 39 

Pasley, 193 

Palterdale, 163 

Peebles, 240 

Peel, Sir Robert, 2S9 

Peel Castle, 165, 263 

Pelter Bridge, 199 

Pennines, 19 

Peninsular War, Wordsworth's views on, 
1S9-193 

Penrith, 20, 50, 158, 201, 222, 293 

Penzance, 156 

Percy's "Reliques," 8 

Petrarch's sonnets, 185 

Philips, Ambrose, 317 

Pinney, 49, 65 

Pitt, William, 48 

Plumer, 59 

Poole, Rev, John, 57, 68 

Poole, Thomas, career of, 55-58 j friend- 
ship with Coleridge, 56, 57, 62, 142 ; 
with Southey, 56 ; with Wordsworth, 
56, 70, 90 ; with Thelwall, 68 ; with 
De Quincey, 198; with Hartley 
Coleridge, 296 ; revolutionary ideas 
of, 56, 90 

Pope, Alexander, 5, 6, 8, 259 

Porson, 305 

Portugal, 190; Southey in, 50, 54, 104 ; 
Quillinan in, 293 

Praed, Robert, 102 



Quantocks, the, 62, 64, 65, 77, 80, 91 ; 
Wordsworth and Dorothy among, 
55-59, 61, 139; " Lyrical Ballads " 
planned among, 323 

Quillinan, Edward, career of, 292-293 ; 
at Southey's funeral, 116; literary 
works, 293 ; marriage with Miss 
Bryder, 293 ; with Dora Wordsworth, 
293 ; Graves's guest to meet Hamilton 
and Butler, 299 ; attacks Landor in 



354 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Wordsworth's defence, 305 ; friend of 
Crabb Robinson, 306 ; Wordsworth at 
death of, 313 
Quillinan, Rotha, 293 

R 

Racedown, Wordsworth and Dorothy at, 
49-50, 65, 66, 129, 149 ; Coleridge's 
visits to, 55, 58, 59, 141, 149 

Radchffe, Mrs., 6, 196, 261 

Raincock, William, of Rayrigg, 31 

Raise, 142, 189, 226 

Raleigh, Prof. Walter, critic of Words- 
worth, 336-337 

Ratzeburg, Coleridge at, 119 

Rawson family, 46 

Redcliffe Hall, 54 

Reed, Prof. Henry, 300, 301 

Reynolds, John Hamilton, 275 

Richardson, Lady (Mary Fletcher), 
309-311 

Richardson, Sir John, 309 

Robertson, Frederick, 289 ; estimate of 
Wordsworth by, 328, 329 

Robespierre, 46, 47, 56 

Robinson, H. Crabb. See Crabb Robin- 
son 

Rogers, Samuel, 289, 290, 294-295 

Rosslyn, 240 

Rothay, scenery, 22, 125, 279 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, revolutionary 
views of, shared by Wordsworth, 3 ; 
by Southey, 41, 42 ; Wordsworth's 
supposed discipleship of, 317 ; his 
likeness to, 335 

Ruberslaw, 243 

Rugby, 12, 126, 307 

Ruskin, John, 12, 20, 74, 245, 246, 301 

Rydal, 19, 22, 125, 127, 135, 137, 286, 
335 

Rydal Beck, 125 

Rydal Cottage, 293 

Rydal Mount, 125, 149, 279 
Description of, by Dorothy Words- 
worth, 140 
Visits to, by— Canning, 256 ; Scott, 
256 ; Keats, 275 ; Hamilton, 299 ; 
Emerson, 301 ; Crabb Robinson,3o6; 
II. Martineau, 308 ; I. Fenwick, 
311 
Wordsworth's home at, 114, 207, 



279-313 ; school feast on his birth- 
day, 311 

Rydal Nab, 211 

Rydal Water, 125, 185, 199, 279 



St. Albyn family, 65, 90 

St. Andrews, 24 

St. John's Vale, 19 ; in " The Wag- 
goner," 227 

Salisbury, 24 

Salt, Samuel, 59 

San Domingo, 187 

Sandys, Edwin, Archbishop of York, 26 

Sayers (Norwich poet), no 

Scafell Pike, 20 

Scandale Beck, 125 

Scawfell, 18, 20 

Scotland — Scott the revealer of, 236 ; 
Wordsworth's tours in, 237-243, 247, 
284, 289 ; Dorothy's journal of first 
tour, 68, 237 

Scott, Anne, 247, 256, 257 

Scott, Lady, 240, 243, 247 

Scott, Major, 247 

Scott, Sir Walter- 
Career of — candidate for Laureateship, 
97 ; at Lasswade, 239 ; Sheriff of 
Selkirkshire, 239 ; Wordsworth's 
and Dorothy's visit to, 237, 239, 
240 ; Jedburgh Assizes, 240, 242 ; 
at Melrose with Wordsworth and 
Dorothy, 241 ; at Hawick, 243 ; at 
the Lakes, 243, 244 ; climbs Hel- 
vellyn with Wordsworth and Davy, 
243 ; with Anne and Lockhart in 
Ireland, 256 ; at the Lakes with 
North, 256-257 ; Wordsworth's and 
Dora's visit to Abbotsford, 246-248 ; 
visit to Newark Castle, 247 ; journey 
to Naples, 248 ; death of, 246 
Character of, 237, 240, 242, 246, 278 
Criticisms by — of North, 254 ; of 

Wordsworth, 237, 244, 245 
Estimates of, by — 
Byron, 96 
Goethe, 99 
Jeffrey, 216 
Ruskin, 245 

Wordsworth, 10, 99, 213, 236, 
237, 240, 243-246 



I 



INDEX 



355 



Scott, Sir Walter — continued 

Literary friendships and connections 
with — 

Byron, 96 

Canning, 256 

North, 256, 257 

Southey, 257 

Turner, 247 

Wordsworth, 10, 240-244, 246-258 ; 
letter after first meeting, 243 ; 
tribute to, in " Extempore Effu- 
sion," 249 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 239-244, 
246 

Wordsworth, Mrs., 246 
Publications of — 

" Demonology and Witchcraft," 246 

" Lay of the Last Minstrel," 93, 240 

" Marmion," 93 

" Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," 

239 
Novels, 99, 213, 247 
Reputation of, 96, 108, 316 
Style of, 6, 99, 240, 243, 245, 316 ; 
compared with Wordsworth, 93, 236, 
237 ; influenced by Wordsworth, 325 

Seeley, Sir John, 183, 335 

Shairp, John Campbell, 330-333 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, attitude of, to- 
wards Lake school, 12 ; estimate of, 
by Matthew Arnold, 269, 270; by 
Wordsworth, 262 ; his opinion of 
Wordsworth, 262 ; publication of " Re- 
volt of Islam," 272 ; style and theories 
of, 262-271 

Shelvocke's voyages, 77 

Shenstone, William, 82 

Silver How, 22, 134, 140 

Simpson, Margaret. See De Quincey, 
Mrs. 

Skiddaw, associations of, with Words- 
worth, II, 23, 24, 104 ; Lake poets at 
bonfire on, 115; Charles and Mary 
Lamb near, 222 ; in " The Wag- 
goner," 227 

Snowdon, 152 

Sockburn-on-Tees, 124-128, 282 

Solway, 22 

Somerset, scenery of, 17, 39, 40 ; Cole- 
ridge in, 42, 43, 46, 56 ; Southey in, 
42, 46, 56 ; Wordsworth in, 55, 58, 
59-91, 142 ; conservatism of, 90 



Southey, Robert — 

Appearance of, 100-104 

Career of — at Westminster School, 

41 ; at Balliol, 41, 94 ; Coleridge's 

visit to, 42, 56, 104 ; at Bristol, 42, 

56, 60 ; emigration scheme, 42-43, 

46 ; tours in Somerset, 42, 43 ; at 

Nether Stowey, 56 ; engagement to 

Edith Fricker, 43 ; at Bath, 43 ; 

marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; in Portugal, 

50, 54. 93 ; at Bristol, 55, 93 ; Poet 

Laureate, 97, 104 ; at Greta Hall, 

II, 23, 92, 100, 104, 114 ; death of 

first wife, 115; on the Continent, 

1x6 ; at Lymington, 116 ; marriage 

with Caroline Bowles, 116; death 

of, 1 16, 298 
Character of, 92, 103-106, 113-115, 

117 
Criticisms by, of — 

Byron, 113 

Coleridge, 81 

De Quincey, 206, 20S 

Wordsworth, 81, 115, 322 
Estimates of, by — 

Byron, 97. "3 

Carlyle, 99, 103 

Coleridge, 98 

De Quincey, loi, 213 

Jeffrey, 317 

Lamb, 94 

Macaulay, 99 

Newman, 99 

Stanley, 99 

Wordsworth, 10, 113 
Literary connections v/ith — 

Byron, 97, 113 

Canning, 256, 257 

Carlyle, 101-104 

Coleridge, 42, 54, 94, 98 

Cottle, 41 

De Quincey, loi, 203, 206, 208, 213 

Fenwick, Isabella, 102-103 

Jeffrey, 317 

Lamb, 94 

Landor, 212, 305 

Lovell, 43, 76 

North, 256 

Scott, 256 

Wordsworth, 10, 54, 113, 115; 
criticises Wordsworth, 322 ; in- 
fluenced by him, 325 



356 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Southey, Robert — contimied 

Parentage of, 41 

Politics of, 42-43, 56, 99 

Popularity of, li, 12, 99, 316 

Publications of, 94-95, 107, 113 

Religion of, 44, 57 

Reputation of — as poet, 99, 107, 109 ; 
as prose writer, 107 ; inferior to 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, 104 

Style of, 92-96, 99-100, 107-113, 

277 ; humorous, 105 ; imaginative, 

95 ; his orientalism, 1 10 ; originality, 

109 ; romanticism, 6, 95 

Southey, Mrs. (Caroline Bowles), 116 

Southey, Mrs. (Edith Fricker), 106, 114, 

"5 

Southey, Robert, 41 

Spain, Wordsworth's sympathy with, 
189, 193, 262 

Speddings, the, 47 

Spenser, Edmund, 185, 197, 259, 261 

Stanley, Dean, 99 

Steele, Sir Richard, 48 

Stephen, Sir Leslie, essay by, on Words- 
worth, 332 

Steepholme, 39 

Sterling, John, 326 

Sterne, Rev. Lawrence, 220 

Stevenson, Robert Louis^ 10 

Stewart, Mary, Queen of Scots, 25 

Stone, Arthur, 134 

Storrs, 256 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 335 

Switzerland, Wordsworth's anger at loss 
of freedom by, 15, 184, 262 



Talfourd, 305 

Tarbet, 237 

Tasso, 109, 185 

Taylor, Sir Henry, friendship of, with 
Southey, loi, 103, 114 ; with Isabella 
Fenwick, 102, 311 ; with Carlyle, 103, 
303 ; with Wordsworth, 303 ; famous 
for good looks, 311 ; Wordsworth's 
advocate in the Quarterly, 327, 328 

Taylor, Rev. William, 27, 28, 46 

Tennyson, Lord, delicacy of versification 
of, III ; dawn of fame of, 289, 290 ; 



pestered by tourists, 294 ; popularity 
of, 326, 329, 330 ; Wordsworth's appre- 
ciation of, 290 ; otherwise mentioned, 
4, 204 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 334 

Thelwall, John, 67, 68, 90 

Thirlmere, scenery of, 22, 23 ; asso- 
ciated with " The Waggoner," 134, 
226 

Thomson, 8, 82 

Tintern Abbey, 91, 275 

Tooke, Horn, 67 

Trafalgar, 167, 184, 188 

Truro, 156 

Turner, 247, 301 

Tweed, 239, 242, 247 

Tyson, Ann, 26, 27 



U 



Ullswater, 19, 22, 126, 157, 163, 202 
Ulverston, 45, 47 



I 



Vale of St. John, 23 
Valley of Rocks, 77 
Venice, 187, 261, 262 
Vimiero, 189, 190 
Virgil, 109 
Voltaire, 272, 305 



W 



Warton, Joseph, 7, 176 

Wales, furnaces of, 39 ; De Quincey 

in, 195, 196 ; Scott in, 256 
Walpole, Horace, 6, 9 
Wansfell, 22 
Watchet, 77 
Waterloo, 184, 1 88, 284 
Wellington, Duke of, 193 
Wesley, John, 107 
West Country, 40 
Westminster School, 41 
Westmorland, descriptions of, II, 19, 

20 ; Wordsworth's tour in, with John 

and Coleridge, 125-128 
"White Moss," 135, 199, 313 



INDEX 



357 



Whitman, Walt, 222 

Whitwick, 290 

Wieland, 118, 119 

Wilberforce, 156 

Wilson, John. See North 

Windermere, 11, 12, 18-20, 26, 31, 32, 
125, 126, 257, 293, 299 

Windsor, 46 

Windybrow, 47, 48, 50, 129 

Wither, 219 

Wordsworth, Charles, 24 

Wordsworth, Rev. Christopher, 24, 44, 
272 

Wordsworth, Dora, birth of, 174 ; girl- 
hood, 292 ; Applethwaite presented 
to, 157 ; visit to Scott with Words- 
worth, 246-248 ; in London, 272 ; 
Hamilton's writing in album of, 299, 
300; marriage of, 306, 312; literary 
works of, 293 ; death of, 293 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, companionship 
of, with her brother, 46-55, 65-91, 
1 18-163, 169, 189, 203-205, 207-291 ; 
her influence on him, 50-58 ; friend- 
ship with Coleridge, 55-155, 204, 
237-238 ; with De Quincey, 200, 202, 
205-212, 223 ; with Lamb, 223-224, 
228, 231, 232 ; with Rogers, 295 ; 
journals of, 68, 80, 141, 158, 1S9, 
237, 284 ; illnesses of, 232, 233, 290, 

309, 313 

Wordsworth, John (brother), birth of, 
24; career of, 158-163; tour in Lake 
district, 125-128 ; estimates of, by 
Coleridge, 125 ; by Dorothy, 161 ; by 
Wordsworth, 158, 159, 160 ; death 
of, 161 ; Wordsworth's poems on, 
161-169 ; Wordsworth's ideal of 
" Happy Warrior," 167 

Wordsworth, John (grand-nephew). 
Bishop of Salisbury, 24 

Wordsworth, John (son), birth of, 174 ; 
on Skiddaw, 115 > with De Quincey, 
202 ; house kept by Dorothy, 290 j 
marriage of, 292 ; at Wordsworth's 
funeral, 313 

Wordsworth, Katy, 174, 175, 209 

Wordsworth, Mrs. (Mary Hutchinson), 
marriage of, 137, 170 ; at Skiddaw 
bonfire, 115 ; appearance described 
by De Quincey, 201 ; walk with De 
Quincey, 202 ; at Rydal during 



Scotch tour, 237, 243 ; in London, 
272 ; Scotch tour, 284 ; visited by 
De Quincey, 200 ; by Yarnall, 300 ; 
by H. Martineau, 308 ; by Isabella 
Fenwick, 312; death of, 313; esti- 
mates of, by Wordsworth (in "Pre- 
lude"), 171 J by Carlyle, 173; by 
De Quincey, 173 ; by H. Martineau, 
309; lines in "Daffodils" suggested 
by, 72 
Wordsworth, Richard (brother), 24 
Wordsworth, Richard (father), 24 
Wordsworth, Thomas, 174, 175, 210, 

224 
Wordsworth, William (son), birth of, 
174; with Lamb in London, 228; 
marriage of, 292 ; at Wordsworth's 
funeral, 313 
Wordsworth, William — 

Career of — birth, 44 ; childhood at 
Cockermouth, 24-25 ; schooldays 
at Hawkshead, 25-38 ; at Cam- 
bridge, 36-38, 44, 46, 49, 298; 
visits to France, 44, 46 j tour in 
Wye Valley, 45 ; at Forncett, 46 ; 
in the Lake district, 46-50 ; at 
Racedown Lodge, 49-58, 60 ; 
visited by Coleridge, 55 ; visit of, 
to Coleridge at Nether Stowey, 55, 
58) 59. 65 ; at Alfoxden, 66-91 ; 
walk to Lynton with Dorothy and 
Coleridge — plan of " Ancient 
Mariner," 77 ; at Nether Stowey, 
91 ; in the Wye Valley, 91 ; in 
Germany, liS-124 ; at Sockburn, 
124, 128 ; Grasmere visit, 128 ; 
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 12 ; at 
Calais, 170, 222 ; marriage and 
wedding tour, 170, 171 ; his children, 
174 ; Scotch tour with Dorothy, 237- 
244 ; at the Rectory, Grasmere, 
174 ; visit to Bootle, 174 ; Katy's 
death, 175 ; Tom's death, 175, 210 ; 
at Allan Bank, 189, 203-205 ; De 
Quincey's visit to, 205 ; appointed 
Commissioner of Stamps, 280 j at 
Rydal Mount, 207, 224, 275, 279- 
313 ; Scotch tour with his wife, 284 ; 
in Ireland, 299 ; Scotch tour with 
Dora, 247 ; visits to London, 272, 
289 ; tour on the Continent, 289 ; in 
Italy, 248 ; honours at Cambridge 



358 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Wordsworth, William — continued 

and Oxford, 289; Poet Laureate, 
289, 312 ; death of Dora, 293, 309 ; 
death, 294, 313 ; grave, 313 
Characteristics of — 
Abstemiousness, 206 
Affection, 161, 232, 233, 237, 254 
Despondency, 136 
Egotism, 2, 119, 220, 272 
Humour, lack of, 16, 89 
Imagination, 13, 31 
Nature, love of, 14, 17, 27-38, 45 
Originality, 3 
Philosophical bent, 13-15, 120, 123, 

237 

Reserve, 208 

Self-complacency, 152, 274 

Tranquillity, 15, 51 
Comparison of, with — 

Arnold, Matthew, 290 

Brownhig, Robert, 290 

Burns, 33S 

Byron, 4, 261-262, 277 

Dante, 336 

Dickens, 334 

Dryden, 339 

Eliot, George, 334 

Goethe, 335 

Gray, 338 

Keats, 271-278 

Milton, 201, 275, 278, 333, 334, 
336, 338 

Pope, 339 

Scott, 4, 236, 237, 244, 245, 277 

Shakespeare, 54, 333, 334, 336, 
338 

Shelley, 262-271, 333, 338 

Southey, 92, 277 

Tennyson, 4, 290 

Thackeray, 334 
Critic as, 175-177 
Criticisms by, of — 

Browiiintj, Robert, 290 

Burns, 82, 23S-239 

Byron, 258, 261, 263 

Carlyle, 302-304 

Coleridge, 233-235, 237, 258, 263 

Cowper, 8 

Emerson, 301, 302 

Goethe, 305 

Gray, 8, 9 

himself, 2 



Wordsworth, William — continued 
Criticisms by, of — continued 
Keats, 212, 258, 271 
Lamb, 226, 233-235 
Landor, 304, 305 
Milton, 306 
North, 251 
Ossian, 9 

Percy's " Reliques," 8 
Pope, 8 
Ruskin, 301 
Scott, 213, 237, 240, 243, 245-249, 

258 
Shelley, 258, 262, 263 
Southey, 113, 305 
Tennyson, 290 
Thomson, 8 
Turner, 301 
Voltaire, 272 
Estimates of, by — 
Arnold, Matthew, 281, 330, 332, 333, 

335 
Brimley, George, 329 
Brooke, Stopford, 334-335 
Byron, 258, 261, 335 
Carlyle, 302-304 
Church, Dean, 333 
Coleridge, 3, 183, 192, 258, 322- 

324, 329, 335 

Crabb Robinson, 305, 306 

De Quincey, 17, 183, 195, 196, 197, 

216, 315 
Fen wick, Isabella, 311, 312 
HazHtt, 183, 215, 319-322, 335 
Jeffrey, 31, 244, 316-319, 329, 335 
Keats, 258, 274 
Lamb, 81, 219-222 
Landor, 304-305 
Leigh Hunt, 183, 274 
Martineau, Harriet, 297, 307-309 
Maurice, F. D., 327, 328 
Morley, John, 335-337 
Mill, John Stuart, 326, 327 
Myers, Frederick, 335 
North, 196, 250-254, 256, 315, 322, 

325. 329 
Raleigh, Prof,, 397 
Robertson, Frederick, 328-329 
Scott, 244-245, 258 

Seeley, Sir John, 335 

Shairp, John Campbell, 330-332 

Shelley, 258 



INDEX 



369 



Wordsworth, William — coftdnued 
Estimates of, by — conthmed 
Southey, 8i, 115 
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 332 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 335 
Taylor, 327 
Yarnall, 301 
Fame of, 17, 289; Southey 's view of, 

115, 315-340; Poet Laureate, 289, 

312, 313 
Family of, 24, 46, 174, 175, 291, 

292 
Literary connections and friendships 
with — 

Arnold, Dr., 12, 298, 306-307, 313 

Baillie, Joanna, 305 

Beaumont, 157 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 290 

Browning, Robert, 15, 290 

Byron, 10 

Cal verts, the, 47-50, 133 

Carlyle, 302-304 

Clarksons, the, 156 

Coleridge, Hartley, 295, 298 

Coleridge, S. T., 9, 12, 55-91, 118- 
155, 156, 162, 291 

Davy, Humphry, 156 

De Quincey, 195-216 

Dewey, 14 

Fenwick, Isabella, 310-312 

Fletchers, the, 309-311 

Fox, X5 

Graves, R. P., 299 

Hamilton, Rowan, 298, 300 

Hemans, Mrs., 12 

Jeffrey, li 

Keats, 10 

Lamb, 217-235 

Landor, 304-305 

Lloyd, 157 

Martineau, Harriet, 12, 298, 307 

Montague, Basil, 49 

North, Christopher, 12, 249-254, 
256, 305 

Pinney, 49 

Poole, 90 

Quillinan, Edward, 293-313 

Reed, Prof., 300 

Rogers, 290, 294, 295 

Raskin, 12 

Scott, 10, 239-248 

Shelley, 10 



Wordsworth, William — continued 

Literary connections and friendships 
with — continued 
Southey, 54, 92, 114-117. 203, 305 
Talfourd, 305 

Taylor, 27, 46, 121, 311, 312 
Tennyson, 290 
Thelwall, 67-69, 90 
Walpole, 90 
Yarnall, 300 
Parentage of, 24, 46, 90 
Personality of, 201 ; when composing, 
287 ; described by Coleridge, 292 ; 
by Mrs. Hamilton, 299 ; by Yarnall, 
300, 301 ; by Emerson, 301 ; by 
Carlyle, 303 ; by Harriet Mar- 
tineau, 307, 309 ; likeness to Dante, 

313 
Politics of, 14, 45, 90 ; revolutionary 
views, 90, 92 ; in the Grasmere days, 
1S3-194 ; conservatism, 275, 281, 
284-285 ; disbelief in despotism, 
300 ; sympathy with French Re- 
volution, 3, 15, 45, 183, 301 ; dis- 
gust at French Revolution, 15, 45, 
183-194,301; sympathy with Spain, 
1S9, 193, 262 
Popularity of, 17 ; never great in early 

days, 289, 315, 329, 338 
Publications of — 
" Borderers," 54 
*' Convention of Cintra," 195 
"Descriptive Sltetches," 3, 44 
"Evening Voluntaries," 287 
"Excursion," 54, 149, 152-155, 222, 

225, 282, 316, 318 
"Independence and Freedom of 

Nations," 190 
" Laodamia," 225, 282 
"Lyrical Ballads," 7, 9, 17, 79-81, 
84-88, 91, 160, (preface) 177, 
195, 198, 219, 237, 250, 259, 315, 
316, 317. 319, 334 
" Musings near Aquapendente," 

248 
" National Independence and Lib- 
erty, Sonnets dedicated to," 15 
" Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
tality," 152, 155, 161, 274, 287- 
289, 318 
" Ode to Duty," 161 
"Old Cumberland Beggar," 81 



360 



WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 



Wordsworth, William — continued 
Publications of — continued 

"Peter Bell," 8i, 88, 89, 225, 226, 

228, 275 
"Prelude," 51-53, 124, 148, 149, 

152, 161, 222, 263, 298 
"Recluse," 129, 152 
"Resolution and Independence," 

13s 
" River Duddon," sonnets, 287 
' ' Stanzas written in my pocket- 
copy of Thomson's ' Castle of 
Indolence,' " 133 
" Tintern Abbey," 275 
"Waggoner," 161, 226, 228 
" White Doe of Rylstone, 203, 282, 

318, 319 
"Yarrow Revisited," 247 
" Yarrow Visited," 284 
Religion of, 13, 31-36, 44, 45 ; as a 
Churchman, 285 ; in grief, 162, 263, 
333 



Wordsworth, William — continued 
Style of — imaginative, 6, 13, 31, 78, 

228 ', lacking in charm, 12 ; in 

humour, 17, 89; simple, 78, 151 ; 

in sonnets, 185; fastidious in diction, 

292 
Workington, 23 
Wycherley, 322 
Wye district, 45, 91, 129 
Wyke Regis, 164 
Wytheburn, 19, 134, 226 



Yarnall, Ellis, 30x3-301 

Yarrow, Wordsworth's visit to, 247, 249, 
284 

Yarrow unvisited, 240 

Yeovil, 39 

Yorkshire, comparison of Western, with 
Lake district, 19 ; Wordsworth's family 
from, 24 ; Wordsworth in, 170 



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